Alice Munro's Late Style: 'Writing is the Final Thing'

Focusing on Alice Munro’s last three collections, this book examines the differences between these volumes and the rest of her work to analyse the emergence and the difference of her 'late style'. Alice Munro has effectively reshaped the short story as a form. This book focuses on Munro’s art of recursion - an approach that has been evident throughout her career but came to the fore in her last three books, The View from Castle Rock (2006), Too Much Happiness (2009) and, especially, Dear Life (2012). This recursion and return manifest themselves not only in Munro's return to previously published pieces, but also to her discovery and meditations on her Scottish heritage, which can be read as entrance to her own understanding of herself and her life. Its provenance, displayed through archival evidence, is complex yet reveals a writer intent on a precise late style. Munro's final works serve as a coda to both her late style and to her entire career as arguably one of the finest short story writers ever to put pen to paper.