Learning to Look

In Learning to Look Lesley Clement traces the evolution of Mavis Gallant's visually evocative style through five decades of her short fictional works. From her earliest explorations of displacement and the disparity between perception and reality, through her later explorations of memory and history, to her more recent explorations of the role of culture in a contemporary world where commercialism and madness threaten to extinguish the potential for illumination and enlightenment, Gallant envisages and renders her fictional world with the techniques analogous to those of visual artists.