The Influences of Cultural Context on the Psychological Development of Child in Alice Munro’s Early Short Stories

Shehata, Abdel Kareem Qutb

doi:10.21608/ejlt.2023.256842.1055

The Influences of Cultural Context on the Psychological Development of Child in Alice Munro’s Early Short Stories

Document Type : Research in linguistic and literary studies

Author

Abdel Kareem Qutb Shehata

Department of English- Faculty of Languages and Translation- October 6 University

10.21608/ejlt.2023.256842.1055

Abstract

Alice Munro is a Canadian short story writer and a novelist who was born in 1931. She won the Nobel prize for Literature in 2013. She published her first and important short story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968. It included fifteen short stories, three of these stories, “Walker Brother Cowboy”, “Images”, and “Boy and Girls”, the first, the third and the ninth, in order, though do not follow each other in the book, they are greatly connected in many ways. The most important of these connections is the child girl main character and narrator. She suffers many aspects of the cultural context, such as parents’ detachment, ways of living, values, customs and gender ideas. How does cultural context influence the psychological development of the child is the question of this paper. The main aim of the paper is to show how the cultural context affects the girl until, at the end of the last story, she regains herself and finds her own identity. The cultural and psychological theories are used in the paper to achieve its main aim.

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