Introduction: Catch and Release – Alice Munro and ‘the human palimpsest’

This introduction takes up and uses two salient moments in Alice Munro’s career to bookend her aesthetic and technical accomplishments in the four collections treated here. The Moons of Jupiter (1982), as Lorrie Moore has argued, revealed Munro’s radical complexity emergent; after the four middle-style books here analysed, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) took her into a late style. This essay briefly treats the bases of Munro’s artistic trajectory by detailing the biographical, textual, and developmental contexts of the four breakthrough books examined here, collections which confirm an ever-deepening artistry between 1986 and 1998. As such this introduction permits reflection on the short story as practised by Alice Munro, along with other key topics such as her life and biography, oeuvre, career and colleagues and the insights into Munro’s work and career by her fellow short story writer Lorrie Moore.