Understanding Lorrie Moore
Alison Kelly
Understanding Lorrie Moore is a comprehensive companion to the works of this wickedly humorous writer, whose fiction shows a deep sensitivity to the dynamics of
contemporary gender relations and an abiding interest in portraying and critiquing the
American national character. The recipient of the 1998 O. Henry Award and the 2004
Rea Award for the Short Story, Lorrie Moore is best known for her short fiction. Alison
Kelly shows that Moore’s virtuosic prose, wry humor, and sense of irony are tools for
registering how Americans face the discomfort of their daily lives as individuals and as
a nation.
Kelly traces Moore’s emergence as a writer in the 1980s and her artistic development up to the present day, illuminating the distinctive narrative methods, aesthetics,
and thematic preoccupations of Moore’s major works. Kelly follows Moore’s recurrent
characters, situations, metaphors, and motifs in order to promote understanding of the
texts and appreciation for their wordplay, wit, and imagery. Viewing her subject as a
subtly political writer, Kelly discusses Moore’s major themes, techniques, and stylistics as
evidence that her characters’ private pains are symptomatic of a wider national malaise.
Understanding Contemporary American Literature • Matthew J. Bruccoli, series editor
June 2009, 208 pages
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Alison Kelly teaches in the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Reading in
the United Kingdom. She received her
Ph.D. from the University of Reading
and holds an M.A. and a B.A. from the
University of Oxford. In 2007–08 she
was a postdoctoral research fellow at
the Rothermere American Institute,
University of Oxford.
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