Literary traveller as reader: Reading Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women in Huron County
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Date
2022-03-31
Authors
Hanson, Anne-Marie
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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the experience of reading and being a reader within sites of literary significance. In this case, the investigation specifically pertains to the experience of a reader of Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971) while visiting sites of significance related to the author and text. Though the literature related to literary travel is robust from a tourism standpoint, there is a need for studies that explore literary travel from literacy and literary perspectives, shifting the focus from the literary traveller as consumer to the literary traveller as reader. This study contributed to the filling of this gap. Using an auto-hermeneutic phenomenological approach, the researcher-participant visited sites in southwestern Ontario that are connected to Alice Munro and Lives of Girls and Women and recorded her experiences as a reader within that literary landscape. Through data analysis and interpretation, the researcher-participant discovered that her lived experience of literary travel included concretisation, exploration, negotiation, and connection. These findings indicated that, for this reader-traveller, literary travel provided the opportunity to engage in reading processes that deepened literary understanding and enhanced appreciation of this text and the author.
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Keywords
Literary travel, Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women, Auto-hermeneutic phenomenology, Literacy, Concretisation, Reading process