“A Sort of Refusal”: Alice Munro’s Reluctant Career

This chapter considers how celebrity reluctance functions in the Canadian literary field, using Alice Munro’s career, reception, and dedication as an example of how reluctance as a very public feeling negotiates the literary marketplace, how it works in the national imaginary to legitimize model Canadian subjects, and how it functions globally to critique a neoliberal economic order that places a premium on moving forward and leaning in. …