Alice Munro by Coral Ann Howells (review)

YES,31, 200 YES,31, 200 space and on Atwood's revisionsof the conventions of popular romance, pastoral, Gothic, and classical myth, so that Canadian 'home ground' begins to look like 'foreignterritory'aswildernessrecedes into the spacesof a vanishedpast. In her opening chapters Roth goes over familiar ground as she retraces the traditions of English Canadian literary history and critical responses to Atwood's earlywriting,and it is in the centralchapterson the laterwildernesswritingthat the strengthof this studylies. Roth worksretrospectively,startingfrom the short story collection Wilderness Tips(i991) as the crucial point of collapse where the forest landscape 'tips'or slipsfrom its statusas Canada's definingculturalmyth. Looking backto the autobiographicalfiction Cat'sEye(1988), she tracessignsof a movement away from the northern wilderness as the geographical place of the narrator's childhood to the urban environments of adolescence and adulthood, where wilderness becomes fragmented or metamorphosed into the spaces of memory or painting, and where Toronto itselfbecomes a haunted urbanwilderness.Back one stage furtherto TheHandmaid's Tale(1985), the natural environment has virtually disappearedin theAmericandystopiaof Gilead, itselfthe consequence of ecological catastrophe. As Roth shows convincingly, in this environment where flowers are most often 'dried,printed, painted or embroidered' (p. I6o), the only naturalsites left to be managed by the totalitarian regime are women's bodies, where the potentially fertile Handmaids are 'a national resource'. Oddly, Roth does not mention the wilderness spaces on the border between America and Canada that constitute dangerousterritoryfor would-be escapees like the narrator,nor does she specify the location of Nunavit in the HistoricalNotes at the end, which is clearlya reference to the newly constituted Native territoryof Nunavut in Arctic Canada and wherewildernessstillexists. Roth's consistentemphasison spatialconcepts and related theories of the representationof space-time through narrativesof memory and fantasy offer significant insights not only into Atwood's recycling of the wildernesstheme but also, and perhapsmore importantly,into her constructionsof female narratingsubjectswith theirdistinctivedouble vision. This is a persuasivestudywhich with its close textual and intertextualanalysesof a group of Atwood's fictions would be very useful for student readers. However, Roth's wildernessargument does not look as new as she claims. Unfortunately for her, between the time when her thesis was written and the publication of this monograph, several studies of the topic of wilderness have appeared (Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (London:Macmillan, 1996), and W. H. New, LandSliding: Imagining Space, Presence, andPower inCanadian Writing (Toronto:Universityof Toronto Press, I997)). UNIVERSITY OF READING CORAL ANN HOWELLS AliceMunro. By CORAL ANN HOWELLS. (Contemporary World Writers) Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 1998. xv + I84 pp. [35 (paperbound ?9.99). Alice Munro is a writerwho is widely admired,yet therehas to date been relatively little critical discussion of her work. As James Wood puts it in a review quoted by Coral Ann Howells, 'Alice Munro is such a good writer that nobody bothers anymore tojudge her goodness [... ] her reputationis likea good address'(p. 137). Howells's book sets out to remedy this situation, offering a lucid and accessible guide which draws out the major themes and emphases of Munro's short fiction. Howells drawsattention to Munro'spreoccupationwith 'the other sideof dailiness', that is, with those vivid anticipations and fears that run alongside our apparently space and on Atwood's revisionsof the conventions of popular romance, pastoral, Gothic, and classical myth, so that Canadian 'home ground' begins to look like 'foreignterritory'aswildernessrecedes into the spacesof a vanishedpast. In her opening chapters Roth goes over familiar ground as she retraces the traditions of English Canadian literary history and critical responses to Atwood's earlywriting,and it is in the centralchapterson the laterwildernesswritingthat the strengthof this studylies. Roth worksretrospectively,startingfrom the short story collection Wilderness Tips(i991) as the crucial point of collapse where the forest landscape 'tips'or slipsfrom its statusas Canada's definingculturalmyth. Looking backto the autobiographicalfiction Cat'sEye(1988), she tracessignsof a movement away from the northern wilderness as the geographical place of the narrator's childhood to the urban environments of adolescence and adulthood, where wilderness becomes fragmented or metamorphosed into the spaces of memory or painting, and where Toronto itselfbecomes a haunted urbanwilderness.Back one stage furtherto TheHandmaid's Tale(1985), the natural environment has virtually disappearedin theAmericandystopiaof...

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