The Body in the Library: Affect, Intertextuality, and Literary History in Alice Munro's 'Wenlock Edge'

• Published in: ELH Vol. 88; no. 4; pp. 1083 - 1109
• Main Author: Rivkin, Julie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.12.2021
• Subjects: Allegory; Allusion; Apocrypha; Ballads; Bildungsroman; British & Irish literature; Canadian literature; Contemporary literature; Culture; Epic literature; Folklore; Heroism & heroes; Intertextuality; Libraries; Literary canon; Literary characters; Literary devices; Literary history; Literary influences; Literary translation; Munro, Alice; Narrative techniques; Older people; Plato (427-347 BC); Plot (Narrative); Poetry; Professional identity; Publishing; Publishing industry; Scott, Walter (1771-1832); Scottish literature; Short stories
• DOI: 10.1353/elh.2021.0032
• ISSN: 0013-8304; 1080-6547

Alice Munro's densely intertextual "Wenlock Edge" offers an allegory for her engagement with literary history. In the story's uncanny central scene, a naked young woman reads A. E. Housman aloud in a private library for an elderly gentleman, evoking in her exposed condition how oral or folk or outsider culture enters the literary canon. A source for this figure, which I call the body in the library, is Munro's ancestor Margaret Hogg, who performed ballads for Sir Walter Scott; other versions of it appear in the story's intertexts (Housman, Gawain, Plato), as well as in Munro's earlier stories of cultural initiation.