Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are?

Robert McGill (University of Toronto)

Ed. by John Thieme, University of East Anglia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Sarah Henzi (Simon Fraser University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1978

Places

Canada (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel
Story Collection

Resources

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Alice Munro's fourth book,

Who Do You Think You Are?

, was first published in 1978 and nominated for the Booker Prize, while earning her a second Governor-General's award for fiction in Canada. It was initially published as

The Beggar Maid

outside of the United States after American publishers worried that readers would not be familiar with the phrase's use as a way of putting someone in their place. However, the themes of shaming and of questioning identity implicit in Munro's preferred title are central to

Who Do You Think You Are?

. Like her earlier

Lives of Girls and Women

(1971), the book features a set of linked stories that depict the life of a woman maturing from girlhood through adolescence in a small town before eventually leaving.

Who Do You Think You Are?

also offers a…

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Citation: McGill, Robert. "Who Do You Think You Are?". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 July 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8779, accessed 22 November 2024.]

Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are?

Dates

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Resources

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