Acknowledgments 21

A Study of Female Growth in Runaway

Introduction    Alice Munro is one of the most important figures in Canadian literature, known as “Canadian Chekhov”. In October, 2013, Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited as “master of contemporary short stories” by Swedish Academy.

Munro was born in a common family in the south of Ontario and graduated from University of Western Ontario. She is good at writing short stories. Dance of the Happy Shades, her first collection of short stories, won the Governor General Award in 1986. During her life, she has published over ten collections of stories and as well as a novel, which helps her gain the high reputation worldwide. During her writing career, she has received so many awards and prizes including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and its Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prizes, the Man Booker Prize, W.H. Smith Literary Award and so on. Her stories can be found in some famous journals like The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly and The Paris Review. 

Runaway won the Giller Prize after its publication in 2004. It consists of eight stories, Runaway, Chance, Passion, Trespasses, Tricks, and Powers. Each story has a common heroine and deals with the original life of women. The heroines in this book all have the impulse to run away or on their way of escaping. Munro’s profound writing skills and abilities are shown in this book. Her stories are so rich that even a tale of less than fifty pages feels as round as a novel. Although Munro doesn’t confess that she is a feminist, we can’t deny her writing focuses on the life and growth of women.

In the 1980’s, the short stories and collections of Munro were widely introduced into many countries and aroused the concern of western critics. The domestic research of Munro started later. But, the study fields in foreign countries and China are generally the same.

Firstly, as a female writer, Munro mainly deals with the life of ordinary women and is good at capturing life conditions and inner minds of women, so many scholars do researches from the perspective of feminism. One of the most important one is Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro, which explores Alice Munro’s female identity, female consciousness and the influence of feminism on the style, technique, and content of her novels. 

The second focus is the narration art of Alice Munro. Munro is good at using flashbacks and other narrative skills to break the traditional way of writing. Many scholars point out that flashbacks are the soul of Munro’s writing. The book Probable Fictions: Alice Munro’s Narrative Dialectics selected and edited nine academic papers including Munro’s narrative technique, narrative structure and narrative language. Also, Edward Dickinson Blodgett in his book Alice Munro analyzes three development stages of Munro’s narration. In the first stage, writer controls the narrators of the story. In the second stage, the narrators realize the uncertainty of narration. In the last stage, all characters in novels are subjected to narration, serving for narration.