Margaret Atwood

by Shannon Hengen

  1164. MYCAK, Sonia. “Divided and Dismembered: The Decentred Subject in Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue ca-nadienne de littérature comparée 20.3-4 (September-December 1993): 469-478. The theme of identity-formation is explored in Bodily Harm.

  1165. NISCHIK, Reingard M. “Speech Act Theory, Speech Acts, and the Analysis of Fiction.” Modern Language Review 88.2 (April 1993): 297-306. Speech act theory is used to analyze two short stories, “Uglypuss” and “Polarities.”

  1166. NOVY, Marianne. “Introduction.” Cross-Cultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare. Ed. Marianne Novy. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. 10-11. Footnote reference to “Gertrude Talks Back.” Reprinted from Good Bones.

  1167. O’BRIEN, Peter. “An Interview with Al Purdy.” Essays on Canadian Writing 49 (Summer 1993): 147-162. Poet Al Purdy on Atwood as a poet: “She’s not as good at poems as she is at fiction. To me what a poet ought to be is to be able to write in many different modes, to have many different voices. I hope I have more than one myself, but I think Atwood generally sounds just like Atwood. I don’t want to always sound like me. I want to have every poem as different as I can make it.” And what is that voice?: “What there is in Atwood’s poems is an unmistakably female voice that is generally rather cold, as it was in the Moodie poems, saying things quite nasty about men (as, for instance, Erin Mouré does). However, she is so clever, she is so brilliant, that what she has to say gets listened to, and should be.”

  1168. O’KEEFE, Bernard. “An Approach to The Handmaid’s Tale.” English Review 3.3 (February 1993): 10-13. Describes teaching the book at a boys’ boarding school.

  1169. OUSBY, Ian. “Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor).” The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 42. Biographical sketch.

  1170. PAYANT, Katherine B. Becoming and Bonding: Contemporary Feminism and Popular Fiction by American Women Writers. Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 1993. passim. Series of references to Atwood and her place in contemporary feminist popular fiction.

  1171. PURDY, Al. Reaching for the Beaufort Sea: An Autobiography. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 1993. passim. Contains several references to Atwood (230-231, 235, 237, 253-255, 276, 278, 283 and 288-289).

  1172. RAMAIYA, Nita P. “The Exploration of the Self in the Poetry of Margaret At-wood.” PhD thesis. S.N.D.T. Women’s University, 1993.

  1173. RAO, Eleonora. “Le Immagini della Differenza nell’Ultima Margaret Atwood: Ripensare un’Etica.” I Linguaggi della Passione. Ed. Romana Rutelli and Anthony Johnson. Udine [Italy]: Campanotto, 1993. 427-433. Bodily Harm, Cat’s Eye, and You Are Happy.

  1174. ______. Strategies for Identity: The Fiction of Margaret Atwood. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1993.

  1175. REICHENBÄCHER, Helmut. “Von The Robber Bridegroom zu Bodily Harm: Eine Analyse unveröffentlichter Entwürfe Margaret Atwoods.” ZAA: Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Berlin; Munich; Vienna; Zürich; New York: Lan-genscheidt, 1993. 54-65. Study of the manuscripts and typescripts for Bodily Harm show the evolution of the title, the beginning versions of the novel, and the changes in setting.

  1176. ROBERTS, Nancy. “Reader as Woman: Gender and Identification in Novels.” PhD thesis. University of British Columbia, 1993. 232 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1993). “The main body of the thesis is a consideration of four novels (Clarissa, The Scarlet Letter, Portrait of a Lady, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles), all of which are centered around a heroine defined by her suffering. In my sixth and final chapter, I turn to the work of two twentieth-century female authors, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, to see in what ways they ‘talk back’ to the tradition which has defined woman as other, to see in what ways, if any, they re-define the possibility of female heroism, and, finally, to consider the implications for the reader.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 54.08 (February 1994): 3020.

  1177. ROSE, Ellen Cronan. “The Good Mother: From Gaia to Gilead.” Ecofeminism and the Sacred. Ed. Carol J. Adams. New York: Continuum, 1993. 149-167. Brief mention of The Handmaid’s Tale in discussion of environmental pollution causing a crisis in fertility.

  1178. SCHOLTMEIJER, Marian. Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice. Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 1993. 330. Brief mention of Atwood’s statement in Survival identifying Canada with animal victims.

  1179. SEXTON, Melanie. “The Woman’s Voice: The Post-Realist Fiction of Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro.” PhD thesis. University of Ottawa, 1993. 484 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1993). “Since Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro do not frequently employ experimental or overtly metafictional forms, they are often read as realist writers in contradistinction to postmodernists. In fact, the assumptions upon which their work rests have little in common with the assumptions underlying realism, and they are as resoundingly post-realist as their postmodern counterparts.… [These writers] do not construct fictions that attempt to mirror life—they recognize the power of voice to construct the world. They are therefore not the naive or conservative ‘realists’ they are sometimes read as. In fact, their work, like that of the postmodernists, challenges and deconstructs the assumptions of realism. However, whereas language for the postmodernists has become little more than a play of empty signifiers, for these women writers it is still vitally allied to power.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 54.11 (May 1994): 4098.

  1180. SHARPE, Martha. “Autonomy, Self-Creation, and the Woman Artist Figure in Woolf, Lessing, and Atwood.” MA thesis. McGill University, 1993. 159 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1994). “This thesis traces the self-creation and autonomy of the woman artist figure in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, and Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye….Drawing on the work of women moral theorists, this thesis suggests that women’s self-creation and autonomy result in an undervalued but nevertheless workable solution to the public/private rift.” (Author). For more see MAI 32.06 (December 1994): 1527.

  1181. ______. “Margaret Atwood and Julia Kristeva: Space-Time, the Dissident Woman Artist, and the Pursuit of Female Solidarity in Cat’s Eye.” Essays on Canadian Writing 50 (Fall 1993): 174-189. A discussion of Julia Kristeva’s space-time theory in regard to the protagonist Elaine Risley in Cat’s Eye. Risley’s art signifies space and ultimately communicates meaning beyond language.

  1182. SHELTON, Robert. “The Social Text as Body: Images of Health and Disease in Three Recent Feminist Utopias.” Literature and Medicine 12.2 (1993): 161-177. The Handmaid’s Tale plus Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Johanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975).

  1183. SIMMONS, Jes. “Atwood’s [You Fit into Me].” The Explicator 51.4 (Summer 1993): 259-260. Compares men’s and women’s interpretations of this poem; why male readers miss the poem’s full meaning and find the last lines redundant.

  1184. SMITH, Erin. “Gender and National Identity in The Journals of Susanna Moodie and Tamsen Donner: A Woman’s Journey.” Frontiers 13.2 (1993): 75-88. Moodie represents to Atwood much of the Canadian character which Atwood reinterprets as a poet.

  1185. SPECTOR, Judith Ann. “Marriage, Endings, and Art in Updike and Atwood.” Midwest Quarterly 34.4 (Summer 1993): 426-445. Comparison of Updike’s Marry Me and Atwood’s Lady Oracle. Explores the concept of identity within a marriage.

  1186. SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York; London: Routledge, 1993. Reference to “Giving Birth.”

  1187. STURGESS, Charlotte Jane. “A Politics of Location: Subjectivity and Origins in the Work of Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood.” PhD thesis. University of London, 1993.

  1188. SUGARS, Cynthia. “On the Rungs of the Double Helix: Theorizing the Canadian Literatures.” Essays on Canadian Writing 50 (Fall 1993): 19-44. Atwood is cited as
one of many literary critics who believe Canadian literature encompasses both French Canadian and English Canadian literature. Quebec is perceived as a microcosm of Canada.

  1189. SUTHERLAND, Katherine. “Bloodletters: Configurations of Female Sexuality in Canadian Women’s Writing.” PhD thesis. York University, 1993. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1993). “This study examines female sexuality in the writing of Canadian women from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in both French and English. The primary texts include works by Frances Brooke, Anna Brownell Jameson, Sara Jeanette Duncan, Laure Conan, Frances Beynon, Emily Carr, Elizabeth Smart, Anne Hebert, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Munro.” (Author).

  1190. TAYLOR, Linda Anne. “Depictions of Oppression and Subversion in Handmaid’s Tale and Cat’s Eye.” MA thesis. Central Washington University, 1993. 98 pp.

  1191. TEMPLIN, Charlotte. “Names and Naming Tell an Archetypal Story in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Names: A Journal of Onomastics 41.3 (1993): 143-157.

  1192. TOMC, Sandra. “‘The Missionary Position’: Feminism and Nationalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Literature 138-139 (Fall-Winter 1993): 73-87. The Handmaid’s Tale is influenced by Atwood’s concept of Canada’s relationship with the United States and provides an unexpected conservative representation of women.

  1193. WHITE, Roberta. “Margaret Atwood: Reflections in a Convex Mirror.” Canadian Women Writing Fiction. Ed. Mickey Pearlman. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 53-69. Essay on Atwood’s novels concentrating on the development of the 3-dimensional aspect of the main characters.

  1194. WILSON, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Toronto: ECW Press; Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. Examines Atwood’s works in terms of folklore motifs; includes study of her visual art in that context as well.

  1195. ______. “Margaret Atwood’s Visual Art.” Essays on Canadian Writing 50 (Fall 1993): 129-173. An essay on Margaret Atwood, the visual artist, which compares the visual and literary images of her works.

  1196. WOODCOCK, George. George Woodcock’s Introduction to Canadian Fiction. Toronto: ECW Press, 1993. See especially “Realism and Neo-Realism: Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Matt Cohen, Marian Engel, Rudy Wiebe.” 135-153. Atwood is characterized as an “ironically didactic realist.” She and Laurence, Cohen, Engel, and Wiebe are discussed as Canadian realists. See also “The Translucent Glass: D. G. Jones, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, Patrick Lane, Robin Skelton.” 141-156. Atwood and the careers of five of her contemporaries are examined. Atwood’s poetry is described as more visual in recent years. The theme of survival is evident in her poetry and literature.

  1197. ZIRKER, Herbert. “Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale: A Variety of Literary Utopias.” Studying and Writing the Difference: Essays in Canadian Culture(s) and Society. Ed. Hans Braun and Wolfgang Kloos. Trier: Universität Trier, For-schungsstelle Zentrum fur Kanada-Studien, 1993. 125-139.

  1198. ZONDERVAN, Jean Marie. “Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye: Character Development in Visual Images.” MA thesis. Stephen F. Austin State University, 1993. 54 pp. “The fiction of Margaret Atwood is laden with powerful images, and her most recent novel Cat’s Eye is perhaps exceptional in its use of visual images....The goal of this interpretation is not to come to a comprehensive conclusion about their meaning, but to illustrate that an understanding of the power of Atwood’s images comes in discerning their woven strata of experience that must be taken together.” (Author). For more see MAI 32.02 (April 1994): 433.

  Reviews of Atwood’s Works

  1199. Good Bones. Toronto: Coach House Press; London: Bloomsbury, 1992.

  Australian Book Review 148 (February-March 1993): 54-55. By Carolyn UEDA.

  British Book News August 1993: 534. Review/announcement of Virago edition.

  Canadian Book Review Annual 1992. Ed. Joyce M. Wilson. Toronto: Canadian Book Review Annual, 1993. 182. By Noreen MITCHELL.

  Canadian Literature 138-139 (Fall-Winter 1993): 105-106. By Neil BESNER.

  Paragraph 15.1 (Summer 1993): 36. By Lisa SCHMIDT.

  University of Toronto Quarterly 63.1 (Fall 1993): 47-48. By Aritha VAN HERK.

  West Coast Line 27.2 (1993): 143. By Billy LITTLE.

  1200. The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English. Selected by Margaret At-wood and Robert Weaver. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1986.

  New Renaissance 8.3 (1993): 138-142. By Ruth MOOSE.

  1201. The Robber Bride. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart; London: Bloomsbury; New York: Talese/Doubleday, 1993.

  The Advocate (Los Angeles) 2 November 1993: 72. By Brad GOOCH.

  Arizona Daily Star (Tucson) 7 November 1993: LIT NewsBank 1993: 94: B5-6. By Colette M. BANCROFT.

  Arkansas Democrat (Little Rock) 24 October 1993: LIT NewsBank 1993: 85: C14. By Celia STOREY.

  Atlantic Monthly 272.6 (December 1993): 142. By Phoebe-Lou ADAMS.

  Booklist 90.2 (15 September 1993): 101. By Donna SEAMAN.

  Books in Canada 22.7 (October 1993): 30-31. By Joan THOMAS.

  British Book News December 1993: 748-751. Part of survey, “Fiction ‘93.” By Valentine CUNNINGHAM.

  Buffalo News 24 October 1993: Section: Book Reviews: 7. By Charles A. BRADY. (1187 w).

  Chicago Sun-Times 31 October 1993: Section: Show: 12. By Wendy SMITH. (961 w).

  Christian Science Monitor 19 November 1993: Section: Books: 19. By Merle RUBIN. (1069 w). Excerpt: “Readers may well enjoy Atwood’s crisp writing, neatly interwoven plotting, sharp-eyed descriptions, and wry sense of humor. But those who imagine The Robber Bride to be a work of large significance with anything profound or new to say about gender, power, love, hate, or the nature of good and evil, are simply kidding themselves.”

  Cosmopolitan November 1993: 30. By Chris CHASE.

  Denver Post 25 November 1993: LIT NewsBank 1993: 94: B10. By Maureen HARRINGTON.

  Elle 9.3 (November 1993): 84. By Leslie BRODY.

  Entertainment Weekly 12 November 1993: 55. By Tom DE HAVEN.

  Financial Post 87.40 (2 October 1993): S10. By Araminta WORDSWORTH.

  Financial Times 16 October 1993: Section: Books: 20. By Anthony THORN-CROFT. (313 w).

  Glamour December 1993: 170. By Sara NELSON.

  The Guardian 5 October 1993: Section 2: 12-13. By Noah RICHLER. (934 w). Excerpt: “Even if you’ve not read the early Atwood, there is the feeling of having been this way before. And too, there is something of the Empress here, poverty at the core which no pretension to greater ideas will disguise. There is no battle going on, and Zenia, on whom this novel so much depends, is not a mystery, but an irritant who should just be shooed away. Perhaps, in sharper hands, she might have made a wonderful novel of laughter, mischief, and pain, but this novel is as much a charade as Zenia is, and no end of wordy ref-erences—to the Gulf, the IRA, Lebanon, AIDS or Gerald Bull—will help a story which finally depends on Charis’s tarot cards for its weight and ring of truth.”

  Hamilton Spectator (ON) 30 October 1993: Section: Weekend: 4. By Sandra HUNTER. (784 w).

  Harper’s October 1993: 26. By Patrick GALE.

  Hartford Courant 14 November 1993: LIT NewsBank 1993: 94: B11. By Kitty BENEDICT.

  The Herald (Glasgow) 9 October 1993: 8. By Carl MacDOUGALL. (751 w).

  Houston Chronicle 21 November 1993: Section: Zest: 22. By Rich QUACK-ENBUSH. (907 w).

  The Independent 17 October 1993: Section: Sunday review Page: 47. By Salman RUSHDIE. (866 w). Excerpt: “The Robber Bride is a tale of small, private catastrophes. Its villain unleashes nothing grander than domestic and emotional violence. But it is vividly written, acutely observed and is very possibly the most intelligently tongue-in-cheek novel of the year. It is as good as ever to hear Margaret Atwood’s dry, droll, spiky voice. Why the novel is being published too late to make the Booker shortlist, however, remains a mystery.”

  The Independent 23 October 1993: Section: Weekend Books: 32. By Helen BIRCH. (930 w).


  Kirkus Reviews 61.19 (1 October 1993): 1215. ANON.

  Library Journal 118.12 (July 1993): 58. “Prepub Alert” also announces large print edition and abridged audio. By Barbara HOFFERT and Mark ANNICHIARICO.

  Library Journal 118.16 (1 October 1993): 125. By Barbara HOFFERT.

  Literary Review October 1993: 53. By Elizabeth IMLAY.

  Los Angeles Times 14 November 1993: Section: Book Review: 3. By Richard EDER. (1122 w). Excerpt: “It is rather poor Atwood country, flat and sometimes marshy. The road that leads through it winds at excessive length to take in a great deal of uninteresting scenery. It could have cut across and reached the same destination much faster.”

  Maclean’s 106.40 (4 October 1993): 55. By Judith TIMSON. (918 w).

  Minneapolis Star and Tribune 31 October 1993: LIT NewsBank 1993: 85: D1. By Dave GOLDSMITH.

  Ms. “International Bookshelf.” 4.3 (November-December 1993): 65.

  The Nation 257.20 (13 December 1993): 734-737. By Linda HUTCHEON.

  New York 26.45 (15 November 1993): 93. By Rhoda KOENIG.

  New York Review of Books 40.21 (16 December 1993): 14, 16. By Gabriele ANNAN.

  New York Times 26 October 1993: Section: C: 20. By Michiko KAKUTANI. (841 w). Excerpt: “In a shorter, more focused book, [Atwood’s] cartoonlike approach to writing might have resulted in a kind of darkly colored fairy tale, but for all her narrative skills, Ms. Atwood is unable to ever really lift her story into that magical realm of fable. Her characters remain exiles from both the earthbound realm of realism and the airier altitudes of allegory, and as a result, their story does not illuminate or entertain; it grates.”