A Study of Alice Munro’s Novels in Perspective of Feminist Literary Criticism Based on Corpus Stylistics

Abstract

Alice Munro, the first Canadian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, is renowned for her portrayals of women’s lives in small-town northern Canada. Her works reflect a feminist focus, often addressing alienation, confinement, and self-definition within patriarchal structures. However, most studies on Munro’s work rely heavily on qualitative methods, leaving room for more objective approaches. This study combines feminist literary criticism with corpus stylistics to address this gap, offering a balanced analysis of feminist elements in Munro’s writing. A corpus of 14 Munro short stories is compared with a reference corpus of works by contemporary male Booker Prize-winning authors using AntConc software. Keyword analysis reveals four major thematic elements: feminism, family, small towns, and winter. Collocational and concordance analyses further explore gendered keywords, highlighting Munro’s unique emphasis on women’s emotions and inner lives. The findings underscore Munro’s distinct narrative perspective, particularly in her portrayal of the female body, which contrasts sharply with male authors of her time. The corpus stylistics analysis approach offers a fresh perspective on understanding Munro’s literary contributions.