Alice Munro: Reminiscence, Interpretation, Adaptation, and Comparison ed. by Mirosława Buchholtz and Eugenia Sojka (review)

Most book-form criticism on Alice Munro, notwithstanding her ultimate literary success in 2013 with a Nobel Prize in Literature, comes from the period between as early as the 1980s and as recent as 2015. Select publications include, for example, Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts (1983) by Louis King MacKendrick, Alice Munro: Paradox and Parallel (1987) by Walter Rintoul Martin, Alice Munro (1988) by E.D. Blodgett, Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro (1990) by Beverly Jean Rasporich, Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro (1992) by Magdalene Redekop, The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro's Discourse of Absence (1994) by Ajay Heble, Alice Munro: A Double Life (1995) by Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Alice Munro (1998) by Coral Ann Howells, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography (2005, 2011) by Robert Thacker, The Fiction of Alice Munro: An Appreciation (2008) by Brad Hooper, Alice Munro (2009) by Harold Bloom, and Alice Munro's Narrative Art (2011) by Isla Duncan. The list is not exhaustive; yet, it is sufficient to prove long-standing scholarly interest in Munro's life and the issues addressed in her fiction. Of particular interest is the emphasis on the biographical aspect, bearing in mind that she is a secretive, self-effacing author, despite numerous autobiographical allusions in her work. Alice Munro: Reminiscence, Interpretation, Adaptation and Comparison, a volume edited by Mirosława Buchholtz (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland) and Eugenia Sojka (University of Silesia, Poland) has been an important contribution to book-form criticism of Munro since the writer received the Nobel Prize in 2013. The editors are experts on Canadian literature whose contributions to the development and promotion of Canadian studies reach far beyond the Polish borders and are international in scope. Both also share significant experience in directing Canadian research centres in Poland: Professor Mirosława Buchholtz was the director of the Canadian Resource Centre in Toruń and dr hab. Eugenia Sojka has been a long-time director of the Canadian Studies Centre in Sosnowiec. Their recent co-edited contribution on Munro includes personal recollections shared by those who have met the Canadian writer (the first part, "Reminiscence"), insightful hermeneutical analyses of Munro's short prose (the second part, "Interpretation"), critical and cross-sectional discussion of Munro's work adapted for various media (the third part, "Adaptation"), and thought-provoking juxtapositions of Munro's literary activity with the oeuvre and heritage of other writers and artists (the fourth part, "Comparison").

The opening article, "Intertextual Encounters with Alice Munro: Introduction," by Eugenia Sojka and Mirosława Buchholtz" (7-14), sets the goal of examining "a critical international and intercultural standpoint on Munro's art of short story writing that is not limited to a literary interpretation of the genre, but also gives critical perspectives on film and stage adaptations of her work" (8). The editors certainly deliver on this promise because the scope of the volume indeed extends beyond the limits of literary studies and the examination of the short story form in Parts II and III. The collection also includes "comparative analyses with Mavis Gallant's and Eudora Welty's writing by academics from Poland, Canada and France" with a contribution from George Elliott Clarke, informed by a postcolonial perspective; additionally, the volume features "exclusive reminiscences of encounters with the author by such Canadian writers as Tomson Highway and Daphne Marlatt" (8). These aspects of the collection are covered in Parts IV and I, respectively. The specific goals, as set by the editors, determine the order in which the essays will be reviewed here: starting with Parts II and III, then moving into Part IV, and finally to Part I.

The first article in Part II is Lola Lemire Tostevin's "A Touch of Evil in Carstairs" (35-41). Tostevin argues that Munro's stories are about "secrets, fantasies and, ultimately, the confinement of violence found at the heart of the human...