Event: Materiality in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro: Special Issue Launch

This launch event celebrates the publication of a new Short Fiction in Theory and Practice special issue which critically examines materiality in the short fiction of Alice Munro (1931-2024). Throughout her fourteen collections of short stories, Munro has shown a clear interest in how her characters’ inner life and perception of the world are defined by the material things most immediate to them, as exemplified in the epigraph, a well-known quotation from Lives of Girls and Women. In Munro’s work, materiality is central to an understanding of social, gendered and individual existence, as the two are interconnected. Material things nurture the imagination, where they stick and develop as significant, unfathomable images. They physically anchor characters in the here and now, but they also speak to mind and spirit. Whether they are kept or discarded, over time, they haunt the protagonist and lead on to chains of memories, repeatedly re-membered, and with variations. They may become symbols of something larger than themselves, but more often than not they remain images stored up in memory, as so many active links to the past that transform the perception of the present.

Link to join and watch the event:

The speakers

Corinne Bigot is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial and British Literatures at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France. Her research interests include postcolonial (particularly Canadian) literature and the genre of the short story. She is the author of Alice Munro: Les silences de la nouvelle (2014) and the co-author, with Catherine Lanone, of Sunlight and Shadows: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades (2014). She guest-edited a special issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies called Alice Munro: Writing for Dear Life in 2015. She is the co-author, with J.R. (Tim) Struthers, Ailsa Cox and Catherine Sheldrick Ross of Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books (2024).

Ailsa Cox is the world’s first Professor of Short Fiction. Her books include Alice Munro (Northcote House 2003), Writing Short Stories (Routledge, 3 rd edition 2025); The Mind’s Eye: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades with Christine Lorre (Fahrenheit 2015); and Reading Alice Munro’s Breakthrough Books, in collaboration with Tim Struthers, Corinne Bigot and Catherine Sheldrick Ross (EUP, 2024). She has written extensively on other writers including Katherine Mansfield, Helen Simpson, Daisy Johnson and Jon McGregor, and is principal editor of the peer-reviewed journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. Her own fiction has been widely published, most recently in the mini-collection Precipitation (Confingo 2025).

Christine Lorre is Professor of English at the University of Caen Normandy, France. She did her doctoral work on Canadian literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Her research since then has focused on postcolonial literature and arts and is located in various areas where gender, the postcolonial, globalisation, cross-cultural transfers, and environmental humanities converge. Among other publications, she is the co-author, with Ailsa Cox, of The Mind’s Eye: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades (Fahrenheit, 2015) and the co-editor with Eleonora Rao, of Space and Place in Alice Munro’s Fiction: A Book with Maps in It (Camden House, 2018). She is currently the President of the Société des Études Postcoloniales (SPEC; the French Society for Postcolonial Studies) and of the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS).