Department of English & Modren European, Lucknow University.
[The revised version of the paper presented at a National Seminar organized by the Department of English, University of Meerut, September 27–28, 2002]
The ‘self’ as subject forms the bedrock of most of fictional narratives and autobiographical writings. In Rousseau and those who have followed his example, self-revelation has been taken to extreme degrees, and the term “confessional” has been given to what has become a subgenera. Self-revelation figures prominently in the writings of many contemporary women writers. But while revealing their ‘self’ they make a significant department from tradition as they seem to reject the literary ‘hegemony’ established by ‘made modernism’ which considered the literary work as a ‘mask’. The concept of literary work as a ‘mask’ and especially of ‘male invention’ in which a character longs to discard his ‘mask’ and bear his true ‘self’, but cannot, has been discarded by these writers and substituted with an alternate strategy, writing becomes “big striptease that holds back nothing”. I will be discussing in this paper how the self-revelation of Munro's female protagonists raises them to the pedestal of an artist in Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think you Are? which have been designated as Canadian kunstlerroman, an artist-novel by David Williams, an eminent Canadian critic.
