| Abstract: | This essay reads Munro’s 2001 story collection as embodiment of her artistic accomplishment. Beginning with a 1952 internal Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reader noting “evocative and luminous phrases” in two of Munro’s earliest stories, it argues that such phrases have informed Munro’s fiction throughout her career. In Hateship, these phrasings are key to “Family Furnishings,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” “Post and Beam,” “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” and especially “Nettles.” There Munro structures her stories around “real facts in the making,” combining autobiographical facts and situations with her imaginative renderings of them. This collection reveals Munro at the height of her accomplished art. |
