"A story is not a road to follow..": Narration and Discourse in Alice Munro's early fiction

Alice Munro has devoted her entire career to the short story form in her fourteen collections, having won the Nobel Prize in Literature “as master of the contemporary short story”. This study investigates her art as a storyteller, the processes she performs on the contemporary short story genre in her creative anatomical theatre. The scholarly chapters offers textual insights into a more panoramic view on Munro’s early literary production, embracing stories from her first collection Dance of the Happy Shades . Through different critical approaches that range from linguistics and rhetorical analyses to translation studies, the author insists on the concept that no fixed patterns prevail in her short stories, as Munro has constantly developed, challenged, and revised existing modes of generic configuration, while discussing the fluidity, the elusiveness, the indeterminacy, the ambiguity of her superb writing