1 - Acquiring a Sense of Perspective: The Early Years -- - 2 - Inside and Outside the Frame: Characters in Search of an Audience (1959-1964) -- - 3 - Tyranny of Form: Adjusting Proportions in the Stories of the Early 1960s -- - 4 - Portraiture and Landscapes of "Life at Point Zero": A Decade of Remembering and Exorcising and Remembering (1963-1972) -- - 5 - Coloration of Monochromatic Moments (1968-1978) -- - 6 - Mapping Panoramic Landscapes: Idyll, Farce, Parody -- - 7 - Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction
"Lesley Clement shows that throughout Mavis Gallant's career she increasingly explores the boundaries between visible and invisible worlds as the lines, shapes, and colours suggested by her allusions, analogies, and structures gives her fiction the perspective and fluidity that illuminate the printed page. Alerted to the visual cues in Gallant's fiction by Clement, the reader acquires a heightened understanding of worlds and lives that might otherwise be unseen."--BOOK JACKET.