Mavis Gallant (original) (raw)

In unsentimental prose and with sharp wit, Canadian-born Mavis Gallant portrays the isolation, fear, and detachment that afflict rootless North American and European expatriates. Gallant’s challenging stories require her readers’ active participation; unless they add their own building blocks, the stories will not stand. Danielle Schaub discusses Gallant’s disconcerting use of techniques and their impact on her work’s thematics, reconciling the inherent tension governing the lives of Gallant’s characters and the way she strains language and exploits narrative devices to translate it. Schaub contends that irony, the multiple perspectives of her stories, narrative voices, stylistic devices, interaction between text and image, atmosphere, and structural frame build up a tension that mirrors the characters’ displacement and disconnectedness. Metafictional allusions highlighting the author’s need to convey how her writing functions are also analysed, allowing the readers to share the ironic perspective from which the stories are written. Social, political, and historical issues treated in Gallant’s work are discussed in relation to the techniques used, making it easier for readers to understand the largely European context of the stories. Each chapter of Mavis Gallant discusses one technique in depth, giving readers adequate tools to study the same technique in other volumes by Gallant. The variety of techniques both highlights Gallant’s skilfulness and clarifies her work, both on thematic and technical level. Schaub’s clear and immensely helpful introduction makes a difficult writer accessible to all. Included in the volume are a Preface, Acknowledgements, Chronology, Notes and References, Selected Bibliography, and Index.