The Other Country: Patterns in the Writing of Alice Munro

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

A number of full-length works of literary criticism on the fiction of
celebrated Canadian author Alice Munro have been published to date. Some
are highly theoretical, most so much so that theory swamps the art it
builds upon. This text swings in the opposite direction, Carscallen’s
intention being not to offer a “general treatise on literary theory,
or Canadian literature, or the short story.” Instead, he is largely
concerned with the structure beneath the surface of Munro’s writing,
and with conveying the complexities of these structures in plain
English.

With editing and pruning, this could have been a much stronger and more
useful book. As it stands, Carscallen’s insights are compromised by an
associative, convoluted, and self-indulgent writing style. Nonetheless,
undergraduate students may be able to use the book as a starting point
for their own studies of Munro’s fiction.