SOURCE: Smythe, Karen E. “Gallant's Sad Stories.” In Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy, pp. 22-60. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Smythe addresses the defining characteristics of Gallant's short fiction, asserting that “Gallant's narrative strategies invite our empathic participation in the texts.”

Though Mavis Gallant's fiction has received a great deal of critical attention in the last ten or twelve years, much of that criticism has been limited to noting Gallant's main themes: W. J. Keith states that “the concept of abandonment or betrayal” is central,¹ and Janice Kulyk Keefer and Neil K. Besner focus on the role that memory plays in her characters' and narrators' worlds. But few have attempted to relate the form of Gallant's fictions to their content. A special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing—the “Mavis Gallant Issue”—was published recently, and therein several articles explore structural...