Many of Munro's stories are set in Huron County, Ontario.[32] Strong regional focus is one of her fiction's features. Asked after she won the Nobel Prize, "What can be so interesting in describing small town Canadian life?", she replied: "You just have to be there."[33] Another feature is an omniscient narrator. Many compare her small-town settings to writers from the rural American South. Her characters often confront deep-rooted customs and traditions. Much of her work exemplifies the Southern Ontario Gothic literary subgenre.[34]
A frequent theme of her work, especially her early stories, is the girl coming of age and coming to terms with her family and small hometown.[30] In work such as Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) and Runaway (2004) she shifted her focus to the travails of middle age, women alone, and the elderly.[31] Munro's stories explore human complexities in an uncomplicated prose style.[35] Her prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic and serious at the same time", "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming bigotry", "special, useless knowledge", "tones of shrill and happy outrage", "the bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it". Her style juxtaposes the fantastic and the ordinary, with each undercutting the other in ways that simply and effortlessly evoke life.[36] Robert Thacker wrote:
Munro's writing creates ... an empathetic union among readers, critics most apparent among them. We are drawn to her writing by its verisimilitude—not of mimesis, so-called and ... "realism"—but rather the feeling of being itself ... of just being a human being.[37]
Many critics have written that Munro's stories often have the emotional and literary depth of novels. Some have asked whether Munro actually writes short stories or novels. Alex Keegan, writing in Eclectica, answered: "Who cares? In most Munro stories there is as much as in many novels."[38]
The first PhD thesis on Munro's work was published in 1972.[39] The first book-length volume collecting the papers presented at the University of Waterloo's first conference on her work, The Art of Alice Munro: Saying the Unsayable, was published in 1984.[40] In 2003/2004, the journal Open Letter. Canadian quarterly review of writing and sources published 14 contributions on Munro's work. In 2010, the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE)/Les cahiers de la nouvelle dedicated a special issue to Munro, and in 2012, an issue of the journal Narrative focused on a single story by Munro, "Passion" (2004), with an introduction, summary of the story, and five analytical essays.[40]
Creating new versions
Munro published variant versions of her stories, sometimes within a short span of time. Her stories "Save the Reaper" and "Passion" came out in two different versions in the same year, in 1998 and 2004 respectively. Two other stories were republished in a variant versions about 30 years apart, "Home" (1974/2006/2014) and "Wood" (1980/2009).[41]
In 2006, Ann Close and Lisa Dickler Awano reported that Munro had not wanted to reread the galleys of Runaway (2004): "No, because I'll rewrite the stories." In their symposium contribution An Appreciation of Alice Munro, they say that Munro wrote eight versions of her story "Powers", for example.[42]
Awano writes that "Wood" is a good example of how Munro, "a tireless self-editor",[43] rewrites and revises a story, in this case returning to it for a second publication nearly 30 years later, revising characterizations, themes, and perspectives, as well as rhythmic syllables, a conjunction or a punctuation mark. The characters change, too. Inferring from the perspective they take on things, they are middle-aged in 1980, and older in 2009. Awano perceives a heightened lyricism brought about not least by the poetic precision of Munro's revision.[43] The 2009 version has eight sections to the 1980 version's three, and a new ending. Awano writes that Munro literally "refinishes" the first take on the story with an ambiguity characteristic of her endings, and reimagines her stories throughout her work in various ways.[43]
