Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy

Beverly Rasporich is an associate professor in the Faculty of General
Studies at the University of Calgary and the author of Dance of the
Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro.

This is an extraordinarily dense scholarly text and sombre reflection on
the fiction of Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro as elegy and elegaic. The
author establishes the conventions and characteristics of elegy in the
modernist tradition, with Munro and Gallant then being interpreted as
achieving variations on the modernist sensibility. Thesis and theory are
paramount in the reading of these two authors, with an emphasis on
narratological, psychoanalytical, and reader-response approaches. Of
particular academic interest are the philosophical discussions of
Munro’s photographic elegism and the connections drawn between
photography, realism, and elegaic moment.

This book is built on a scholarship of genres, traditions,
classifications, contemporary theoretical approaches, conventions, and
comparisons. Students and professors studying within the traditional
disciplinary boundaries established by departments of English in
universities will find this book useful, although even some of this
readership may find the coining of the term “Munrovian” somewhat
pedantic.