English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

This paper offers a reading of ‘Wood’ by Alice Munro, a short story originally published in  The New Yorker  in November 1980 and collected in her penultimate volume of short stories,  Too Much Happiness  in 2009. The interest of the story derives from its miniaturisation of world literature in a natural environment recognised as next of kin. Using the methodology of close textual reading, I have tried to elucidate some of its conundrums and more specifically discovered an intertextual reference to Khalil Gibran in the mysterious last sentence of the text. I have tried to highlight a few of the other sources Munro has resorted to in a story that summons the tradition of forest writing from Antiquity and the Medieval quest narrative up to contemporary nature writing. This deceptively simple story with epic ramifications renews the short story genre and our expectations of what literature can bring to our lives: rejuvenation and empowerment through the possibilities of rewriting the ordinary scripts of our ordinary existence against our ‘naturalcultural’ legacy.

The legacy of the forest: a source study of ‘Wood’ (2009) by Alice Munro