ABSTRACT
The title of my essay is more than a nod to Barbara Hardy’s Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination (1975); indeed it is the grateful acknowledgement of a legacy, for that book provides the groundwork for my analysis over thirty-five years later of Canadian writer Carol Shields’s narrative art in her short stories. Though Shields’s eight novels may belong to the genre of domestic fiction in the realist tradition, her three short-story collections published between 1985 and 2000 (Various Miracles, The Orange Fish, Dressing Up for the Carnival) frequently break away from realism, slipping between genders and genres into the surreal and the fantastic — a narrative strategy described by Barbara Hardy in her discussion of Jane Eyre as ‘a powerful but temporary unleashing of fantasy still basically subjected to check and control’.2 A fascination with narrative (‘Nature, not art, makes us all story-tellers’; ‘We are narrative animals’),3 and a shared concern with the permeable boundaries between storytelling in everyday life and its multiple fictional forms, create a mirror effect uniting Hardy as literary critic and Shields as creative writer. Their affinity is even closer when we consider that Hardy, like Shields, has written poetry and short fiction, and that Shields also wrote critical essays and biography. As I shall argue, Tellers and Listeners, with its scrupulous attention to language, textuality and literary artifice, offers productive directions for a serious critical analysis of the products of Shields’s narrative imagination.4
