Alice Munro's Narrative Art by Coral Ann Howells
Published 2010 · 85,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is Alice Munro's Narrative Art to read?
Alice Munro's Narrative Art scores 36 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 60 out of 100
- Clear critical prose; narratological terms are introduced and explained for non-specialist readers.
- Sentence structure: 60 out of 100
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Balances close textual reading with broader arguments about narrative form and Canadian literary tradition.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Dense with story-by-story analysis across Munro's full career; covers the primary texts thoroughly.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- The book's own argument is direct; it studies indirection in Munro's work rather than deploying it.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Attends to Munro's symbolic use of Ontario landscape and domestic setting as critical objects.
- Ironic distance: 40 out of 100
- Maintains scholarly distance; Howells reads Munro's ironies without adopting them rhetorically.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- Each chapter reaches clear analytical conclusions about Munro's techniques and purposes.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- Broadly chronological organization through Munro's career, with thematic chapters.
How Alice Munro's Narrative Art is regarded
Alice Munro's Narrative Art holds a literary regard score of 38 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.