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The book studies Alice Munro's inheritance of and contribution to realism in fiction.
Nobel Prize winner Munro follows the empirical tradition of the Enlightenment and draws on her life as a daughter, wife, mother, and professional writer while composing her fiction to reflect Canadian reality. She infuses her intellectual, moral, and aesthetic vision into her stories. This study analyzes her innovative realism in three respects: Her views on feminism and women's issues, her firm yet sympathetic moral stance, and her reconstitution of traditional and modernist (post-modernist) methods of portraying character in time and space. Munro's brand of realism is underpinned by her philosophical perception, her level-headed morality, her dialectical mind, and her versatile narrative style.
This monograph, a voice from China, offers a deep philosophical reading of Munro. Students of the Canadian author, graduate or undergraduate, may find this book useful.
List of contents
1. Tradition and Innovation 2. Revisioned Feminism in Lives of Girls and Women 3. Sympathy and Empirical Morals 4. Discursive Structuring and Revamped Mimesis 5. Conclusion
About the author
Li-Ping Geng is a Professor of English at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, China. His primary interests are in 18th-century British literature as well as Canadian literature.
Summary
The book studies Alice Munro’s inheritance of and contribution to Realism from the perspective of a Chinese scholar.
Report
"Alice Munro's stories can unsettle readers by entangling them in the lives of ordinary people without overt moral comment. Through her own brand of realism, Munro creates characters whose empirical morality is based on personal choices and on empathy or its absence rather than on traditional criteria of right and wrong. Li-Ping Geng goes to the heart of the matter as he traces the sources of Munro's moral stance to empirical Enlightenment philosophers like David Hume and Adam Smith. His insights will deeply satisfy Munro fans."
Jane Rupert (PhD), author of Uneasy Relations: Reason in Literature & Science from Aristotle to Darwin & Blake and John Henry Newman on the Nature of the Mind: Reason in Literature, Science, and the Humanities.
