The Inside of a Shell: Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades

by Vanessa Guignery (editor)

The Canadian author Alice Munro, recognized as one of the worlds finest short story writers, published some seventeen books between 1968 and 2014, and was awarded the third Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. This worldwide recognition of her career calls for a look back at her very first collection of short stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968 and composed of fifteen stories written between 1953 and 1967. Some forty-five years after the publication of this first volume, worldwide specialists of her work examine the first steps of a great writer, and offer new critical perspectives on a debut collection that already foreshadows some of the patterns and themes of later stories. Contributors adopt a variety of approaches from the fields of narratology, gender studies, psychoanalysis, and genetic criticism, amongst others, to illuminate the main stylistic features, narrative strategies, literary traditions, modes of writing and generic traits of the stories in Dance of the Happy Shades.

305 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2015

About the author

Vanessa Guignery is Professor of Contemporary English Literature and Postcolonial Literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon (France), after having taught at the University of La Sorbonne in Paris as Assistant and Associate Professor from 1996 to 2009. She was Visiting Professor at the University of Texas in Austin in 2011 and Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University in Evanston (Illinois) in April 2017. She was a Fellow at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas in Austin in 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2016, and has been a University Affiliate and Scholar there since 2010 for periods of one up to six months. She was a Junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France between 2012 and 2017, and is now a Honorary member. In 2020-21, she was awarded a one-year delegation with the CNRS research unit ITEM, specialised in genetic criticism.

Vanessa Guignery is the author of several books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes, including Julian Barnes from the Margins. Exploring the Writer’s Archives (Bloomsbury, 2020), The Fiction of Julian Barnes (Macmillan, 2006), and Conversations with Julian Barnes (Mississippi Press, 2009), co-edited with Ryan Roberts, the webmaster of julianbarnes.com. She has published articles on Jonathan Coe, Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Jeanette Winterson, Michèle Roberts, Alain de Botton, David Lodge, Janet Frame, Ben Okri, Zadie Smith, Caryl Phillips and Alice Munro, as well as several essays and a monograph on B.S. Johnson, Ceci n'est pas une fiction (Sorbonne UP, 2009). She translated Jonathan Coe’s biography of B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, into French (Quidam, 2010) and edited the correspondence between B.S. Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). She is the author of Seeing and Being: Ben Okri's The Famished Road (PUF, 2012) and of a monograph on Jonathan Coe for Palgrave Macmillan (2016). She is the editor and co-editor of about fifteen books on contemporary literature in English and regularly conducts interviews with writers. From 2000 to 2009, she co-directed the research center ERCLA ("Writings of the Contemporary Novel in English") at the University of La Sorbonne. She is a permanent member of the CNRS research unit IHRIM.