Introduction: Risking Feeling: Alice Munro’s Fiction of “Exquisite Shame”

This introduction places the volume in the context of previous scholarship on Munro and anchors the collection in the wealth of affect and ethical theory that has informed recent cultural studies. We argue that these new essays, taken together, offer us an Alice Munro who is not the kindly Canadian icon reinforcing small-town verities who was celebrated and perpetuated in acts of national teaching with her Nobel Prize win; they ponder, instead, an edgier, messier Munro whose fictions of affective and ethical perplexities disturb rather than comfort.