Abstract

The Substance of Night is a series of linked short stories and fragments. Read in relation to one another, they take the form of an aggressively punctuated coming-of-age narrative in which the protagonist, Alice Webster, comes to terms with the limits of her youthful freedom. In terms of the short story form, I am most interested in tales that deviate from the norm, departing from or reinventing the generic conventions. I am particularly fascinated by the narrative strategies of certain stories by Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant that are unconventionally episodic, stretching over lengthy periods of time and spanning different geographic settings. This extended episodic form is a more fitting vehicle for my essentially lyrical, stream-of-conscious subject matter than the short, sharp shocks of a writer like Raymond Carver. The tales in this collection explore a series of crucible incidents that take place in Alice's childhood and early twenties, determining her sense of emergent identity as a young South African woman in perpetual flight from her motherland