Search results for "Margaret Atwood"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Margaret Atwood and Adaptation: The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond
2021
Margaret Atwood has long been appreciated for her ardent defense of Canadian authors and her genre-bending fiction, essays and poetry. However, an aspect of her work that has perhaps been less thoroughly examined is her work both as adaptor and as source for adaptation in media as varied as opera, television, film, or comic books. Recent critically acclaimed television adaptations of the novels The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu) and Alias Grace (Amazon) have rightfully focused attention on these works, but Atwood’s fiction has long been a source of inspiration for artists of various media, a seeming corollary to Atwood’s own tendency to explore the possibilities of media (graphic novels), genres (s…
Myths of Violence and Female Storytelling in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet
2016
Stories of violence and oppression from classical mythology and fairy tales are redeployed in two novels by Atwood (1985) and Atkinson (1997) as archetypal pre-texts that impact on plot and narrative process. Although they are very different in genre and theme, both novels present first-person female narrators who are trapped in a claustrophobic present, and pose the question of the extent to which a story can be told from within the boundaries traced by myth, fairy tales and quasi-mythical literary texts. Clearly indebted to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a dystopian world where women live segregated by a male regime. References to the tale of Little Red Cap, cl…
Stories of Adaptation: Changing Objects with Margaret Atwood
2021
Under Our Eye: Margaret Atwood's Variation on the Panopticon in "The Heart Goes Last"
2020
In her dystopian dark comedy The Heart Goes Last (2015), Margaret Atwood openly refers to Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon. The future world depicted in her novel is filled with violence and deprived of both human bonds and hope. Hence, being contained, monitored and — after Foucault — disciplined and punished appears to be the characters’ last resort. Surveillance tempts both sexes as it is politically correct and universal, and it does not privilege one group of people over the other. The article discusses the dystopian vision of the near future as created by Atwood in her 2015 novel, with direct references to the conception of the Panopticon, both in its original meaning propos…
Re-Inscription of Female Images and Subjectivities in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride
2012
In exploring the complex female identity models that are articulated in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, this essay foregrounds Atwood’s sensitiveness to one of the major feminist issues of the early nineties: the debate over whether it is/was possible to postulate a distinctive “female specialness”. The essay's specific contention is that, in outlining the complex experiences of three Canadian friends – Tony, Roz and Charis – and of their demonic antagonist, Zenia, across three decades (from the sixties to the early nineties), Atwood questions notions of biological reductionism and, more importantly, the feminist creed of universal sisterhood4.