Alice Munro's short fiction against the Slovene literary and cultural background : doctoral dissertation

english

doktorska dela

2016

Canadian literature   dissertations   literary translation   reception   short stories

Univerza v Mariboru, Filozofska fakulteta

The Canadian author Alice Munro, master of the contemporary short story and winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, received the attention of literary critics in her home country already in 1968, with the publication of her first short-story collection. In her longstanding career, she has published fourteen short story collections, among which many received important literary awards, including Man Booker International in 2009, and several became international best-sellers. However, she was completely overlooked in Slovenia until 2003, when one of her stories was translated into Slovene. It was not until 2010 that two of her collections finally appeared in Slovene, followed by two other by 2015. The issue that this thesis addresses is why Alice Munro was neglected in Slovenia for so long. Our main assumption is that the reasons for the neglect of her work lie in the specifics of her writing, as well as in the specifics of the Slovene cultural and literary space. Munro's writing, which is characterized by complex writing aesthetics and narrative art, as well as by regionalism and the predilection for women's issues, cannot be easily transferred into the Slovene environment, where the short-story genre as well as women's writing have a different tradition, the latter being related to this area's specific socio-political past. Another particularity of the Slovene literary and cultural space is its translation industry and publishing policy, which play a crucial role in deciding which foreign authors will be translated into Slovene.

08.08.2023