ABSTRACT
"The Albanian Virgin" is one of the most intriguing stories that Alice Munro has published so far. This chapter compares Munro's perspective against that of a contemporary Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, a long-time contender for the Nobel prize, the author of the novel Broken April. "The Albanian Virgin" draws on an element that nourished the early European Gothic texts, a remote and "exotic" setting. Munro focuses on the female condition in Albania, Kadare's marginalized and powerless women, among whom she discovers a phenomenon that begs for attention, the cultural construction of a Virgin who can only escape her destiny by living like a man at the cost of renouncing her sexuality. Munro's story engages in a dialogue with the overlap of Gothic and romantic traditions, often fused with travel writing. The most important English writer to have brought Albania into discourse in cliches that prevail even in contemporary criticism was George Gordon Byron.
