Alice Munro’s Ecosophy: from “Walker Brothers Cowboy” (1968) to “Dear Life” (2012)

Abstract

Alice Munro’s interest in and reliance on natural environment, as evidenced by her stories, has been viewed by literary scholars in a variety of ways: generic, thematic, rhetorical, and ideological. While she is unlikely to subscribe to any of the current definitions of ecosophy, the environmental wisdom conveyed and sustained through her fiction is a matter of adopting ecological perspectives, which I would like to study in this article, referring to a handful of stories that span well over four decades of her creative activity.