Alice Munro

Robert McGill (University of Toronto); Revised By: Zhitong Chen (SiChuan University)
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The Canadian writer Alice Munro’s fourteen collections of short stories have garnered her numerous international honours, including the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Man Booker International Prize. Among her fiction’s outstanding attributes are its concern with women’s lives and with the complexities of gender in a changing society, its nuanced accounts of rural communities, and its evocation of the layered, often surprising character of seemingly ordinary lives. She is celebrated as one of the world’s greatest writers of short fiction.

Munro’s protagonists are often women of her own generation who, in their youth during the 1930s and 1940s, are both oppressed by and acute observers of the social strictures and dynamics in their small-town communities. In stories set during

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Citation: McGill, Robert, Zhitong Chen. "Alice Munro". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 June 2002; last revised 04 July 2024. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5050, accessed 21 November 2024.]

5050 Alice Munro 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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