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

Abstract: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.