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Record W4206703347 · doi:10.1353/yes.2001.0001

Alice Munro by Coral Ann Howells (review)

2001· article· en· W4206703347 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Clare Hanson

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Yearbook of English Studies · 2001
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicShort Stories in Global Literature
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsWildernessRomanceUncannyMythologyHistoryArt historyPaintingArtLiteratureEcology

Abstract

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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...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Review · Consensus signal: Review
Teacher disagreement score0.064
Threshold uncertainty score0.215

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0030.003
Open science0.0020.002
Research integrity0.0020.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0640.025

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.028
GPT teacher head0.272
Teacher spread0.243 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreReview

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations0
Published2001
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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