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- Volume 9, Issue 1, 2019
Short Fiction in Theory & Practice - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2019
Volume 9, Issue 1, 2019
- Editorial
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- Articles
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Emporium
By Graham MortIn this short story, a man drifts into a bric-a-brac shop in a rural town to find the past confronting him. He is snared into a lie about his dead wife that haunts the story with images of the past and with actions that draw him deeper into an unintended act of deception.
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‘The great unhappiness of another’: Writers and readers in three stories by Alice Munro
More LessThree Alice Munro stories – ‘Material’, ‘Family Furnishings’ and ‘Fiction’ – feature readers who react to fiction based on material from their own lives. ‘Fiction’ is alone in this group as the story in which the reader is pleased, rather than otherwise, with the story she reads. This different reaction is traced to important aspects of the reader’s characterization. Only in ‘Fiction’ is the reader unrelated to the internal story’s author and not also a writer herself. These traits make her a reader who consistently revises her ideas about the story she reads, as well as one who can be said to resolve a persistent conflict in this small set of stories.
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‘Anything was possible’: (In)fidelities, (dis)connections and narcissistic (self-)love in Alice Munro’s ‘The Bear Came over the Mountain’
By Dan DisneyIn one of Alice Munro’s longer works of short fiction, ‘The Bear Came over the Mountain’, readers are thrust into a narrative in which the protagonist, Grant, is forced to place his ageing and forgetful wife Fiona into a residential care facility. So amnesic is Fiona that, no longer remembering she has hitherto existed happily alongside Grant, she soon forms an intimate friendship with another resident, Aubrey. But Grant is no sympathetic protagonist and Munro reveals how, over the decades, he has habitually conducted a series of secretive extramarital affairs, often with the students he teaches at the local university. Reading a range of texts making taxonomical survey of love (including Plato’s Symposium, Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and Comte-Sponville’s A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues), this article surmises Grant to be dangerously non-empathetic, unwittingly self-parodying and unthinkingly transgressive; within phallogocentric orders, time and again the women surrounding this husband–teacher–lecher are shown to be merely instrumental to his gratifications. When Aubrey’s wife Marian arrives on the scene, Grant falls immediately into the role of fetishizing, perplexingly ordinary-seeming predator; in his flirtations, his actions can be read as methodically self-impoverishing. Beyond a stylized performance devoid of meaningful content, this is a narcissist with nothing to declare beyond a duplicitous and blind, dizzying, self-justifying internal chaos.
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Women’s relational autonomy and the short story cycle: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
More LessFocussing on Elizabeth Strout’s short story cycle, Olive Kitteridge (2008), this article proposes that contemporary collections of interconnected stories open new ways of understanding women’s relational autonomy, and the importance of continuing relationships of interdependence and care. Here, relational autonomy is seen as a framework for shared beliefs that subjects’ situated identities are formed within the context of social relationships and shaped by a complex intersection of social determinants, such as race, class, gender and ethnicity. This discussion proposes that the short story cycle is a particularly productive form for writers interested in exploring how women come to a greater sense of who they are through these relationships – some enduring, others not – as they are experienced through apparently mundane moments in women’s lives. This is partly due to less emphasis on the individual trajectory of an autonomous person, and a greater focus on the shared experiences that shape identities and foster personal growth and collective fulfilment. The article seeks to explore this understanding of the cycle by reflecting on distinctive features of the form – modular narrative structure and narrative openness – seen in Olive Kitteridge, to demonstrate how this mode of storytelling helps make salient women’s relational lives.
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Away from incident
Authors: Amy Lilwall and Rupert LoydellA collaboratively written prose piece, ‘Away from incident’ explores ideas of forms and processes. The authors’ poetics are embedded within the text.
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- Book Review
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- Interview
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