An Incarnational Imagination? Christianity, Narrativity, and Alice Munro's "The Love of a Good Woman".

In her introduction to Alice Munro's Best: Selected Stories, Margaret Atwood identifies a parallel between the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation and Munro's narrative practices: that the "denial of either/or classifying logic and an acceptance of both-at-once mystery" essential to the Incarnation seem parallel to the way in which Munro's stories "resolve themselves--or fail to resolve themselves." Atwood's insight encourages an examination of the narrative engagement with Christianity found in a wide range of Munro's stories. This paper does so in "The Love of a Good Woman" (1998), a test case for understanding the possibilities of incarnational imagination in Munro's fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]