Margaret Atwood

by Shannon Hengen

  Quotations

  1559. “[Quote].” Chicago Tribune 17 July 1995: Section: Perspective: 11. “Canada must be the only country in the world where a policeman is used as a national symbol.”

  1560. “[Quote].” The Guardian 1 November 1995: Section: Foreign Page: 14. Article by Jonathan Freedland titled, “Quebec Gives Canada Splitting Headache,” quotes Atwood: “Just because the faces of Anglos don’t move around a lot when they talk doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings.”

  1561. “[Quote].” Ottawa Citizen 31 March 1995: A11. Includes Atwood commenting on poet known as the “Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan” on the occasion of a new edition of Sarah Binks: The Literary Biography of Paul Hiebert (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart): “Sarah Binks—‘The Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan’—is without a doubt one of the most unjustly neglected of Canadian artists. Indeed, the entire Manure Spreader School of Poetry could scarcely have existed without her; and she has inspired several generations of Canadian literary critics with her pithy motto, ‘Lay it on thick,’ which students of literature will immediately recognize as a direct descendent of John Keats’s famous admonition, ‘Load every rift with ore.’”

  1562. “[Quote].” Toronto Star 25 February 1995: G2. Article by Mitchell Smith entitled, “Dry-Land Sailors Scupper Plan to Bring Drake Home,” quotes Atwood: “Some travelers think they want to go to foreign places but are dismayed when the places turn out actually to be foreign.”

  1563. “[Quotes].” The Guardian 18 November 1995: Section: Features: 34. On At-wood’s birthday, Guardian quotes Atwood about those who study her (“This academic said to me, you’ve written enough for us by now. In other words, drop dead and we can deal with the texts”); about journalists who visit and ask questions (“If you’re going to review the furniture which is what a lot of interviewers do these days—most of it belonged to my father-in-law”); about activists who want her to be a propagandist for the moral superiority of women (“Why should we all be sopranos? I don’t think that feminism ought to mean that all men are bad”); and about literary critics (“They pressured me. Remember the ‘Put your head in the oven or you’re not a real poet’ movement”).

  Interviews

  1564. Margaret Atwood. [Sound recording]. [s.l.]: CBC Radio Works, ©1995. 1 cassette. (23 min.). Atwood interviewed by Peter Gzowski. Originally broadcast September 1993. The author discusses The Robber Bride.

  1565. “What They’re Reading.” Orlando Sentinel 26 November 1995: Section: Arts & Entertainment: F9. Atwood has been reading Athena by John Banville (Knopf), a novel about a mysterious experience involving stolen paintings, a sexual liaison, and a serial killer: “Oh, I just loved it. I thought it was such a hoot. He’s a master of metaphor.”

  1566. ABLEY, Mark. “Dire Things: An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Poetry Canada Review 15.2 (June 1995): 1, 3+.

  1567. BADER, Rudolf. “Margaret Atwood, Toronto.” Anglistik: Mitteilungen des Ver-bandes deutscher Anglisten 6.1 (March 1995): 7-18.

  1568. BASBANES, Nicholas A. “Atwood Gets Lots of Attention without Trying.” Columbus Dispatch 5 February 1995: Section: Features Accent & Entertainment: 6H.

  1569. DORFMAN, Ariel. Margaret Atwood. [Videorecording]. [s.l.]: Distribution Access, 1995. VHS tape 2 videocassettes (ca. 53 min.). In Vol. 1 Dorfman talks to Atwood about her novel, The Robber Bride, and her children’s book, Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut; in Vol. 2 Dorfman interviews Atwood about her book of poems, Morning in the Burned House, and her novel, Cat’s Eye.

  1570. FEAY, Suzi. “Woman for All Seasons.” The Independent 21 May 1995: Section: Review: 30. On poetry. (1187 w).

  1571. GARRON, Rebecca. “An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Clockwatch Review (A Journal of the Arts) 10.1-2 (1995): 108-118.

  1572. HABIB, Marlene. “Atwood Tempts Children with New Book on Ps.” Calgary Herald 18 October 1995: C11. The author interviewed about Princess Prunella.

  1573. MARCHAND, Philip. “Deep Down, Atwood’s a Romantic.” Toronto Star 1 February 1995: D1. Interview in connection with publication of Morning in the Burned House.

  1574. O’BRIANT, Don. “The Writer Speaks: Atwood Puts Away Angst to Spin a Children’s Tale.” Atlanta Journal and Constitution 28 September 1995: Section: Features: 7G. Concerns Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut. Includes some biographical material.

  1575. PADDON, David. “The More Confounding It Is, the More Margaret Atwood She Is.” Vancouver Sun 1 February 1995: C6. Interview in connection with publication of Morning in the Burned House. (705 w).

  1576. ROCKBURN, Ken. Medium Rare: Jamming with Culture. Toronto: Stoddart, 1995. See especially “Peg o’ My Heart.” 61-72.

  1577. STONE, John. “Not a Cash Crop: An Interview with Margaret Atwood.” Revista Española de Estudios Canadienses 2.2-3 (1995): 243-253.

  1578. WERTHEIMER, Linda. “Margaret Atwood Produces Proliferation of ‘P’s.” All Things Considered. National Public Radio, 24 November 1995. Transcript #2041-6. Available from Lexis-Nexis.

  Scholarly Resources

  1579. “Margaret Atwood.” Who’s Who in the League of Canadian Poets: Directory of Members 1995. Compiled and ed. Jill Humphries. Toronto: League of Canadian Poets, 1995. 5. With photo. List of books in print, 139.

  1580. ADHIKARI, Madhumalati. “Articulating Silence: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Literature Today. Ed. R. K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige, 1995. 154-165.

  1581. ALLEN, Beverly. “From Multiplicity to Multitude: Universal Systems of Deformation.” Symposium 49.2 (Summer 1995): 93ff. How Atwood (Milan Kundera and Gabriel Garcia Márquez) break down the traditional form and function of the novel.

  1582. APTER, Terri. Secret Paths: Women in the New Midlife. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995. Refers to Elaine Risley, from Cat’s Eye, making the journey through midlife. 151-152.

  1583. BARAT, Urbashi. “Cat’s Eye: Margaret Atwood’s Portrait of the Artist as a Woman and a Survivor.” Canadian Literature Today. Ed. R. K. Shawan. New Delhi: Prestige, 1995. 174-185.

  1584. BEYER, Charlotte. “From Violent Duality to Multi-Culturalism: Margaret At-wood’s Post-Colonial Cultural and Sexual Politics.” O Canada: Essays on Canadian Literature and Culture. Ed. Jørn Carlesen and Tim Caudery. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus UP, 1995. 97-108.

  1585. ______. “Margaret Atwood’s Innovative Vision of Gender, Genre, Postmodernism and the City in The Robber Bride.” British Journal of Canadian Studies 10.1 (1995): 146-155.

  1586. ______. “The Writing of Margaret Atwood: Post-Colonialism, Feminism, Narrative.” PhD thesis. University of Warwick, 1995. 365 pp.

  1587. BHARATHI, V. “‘Shifting Generic Boundaries’: A Study of the Short Stories of Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence and Margaret Atwood.” Postmodernism and Feminism: Canadian Contexts. Ed. Shirin Kudchedkar. New Delhi: Pencraft, 1995. 247-263.

  1588. BLACK, Joseph, and J. L. BLACK. “Canada in the Soviet Mirror: English-Canadian Literature in Soviet Translation.” Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue d’études canadiennes 30.2 (Summer 1995): 5-18. Focuses on period between 1918 and 1985 and includes some comments on Atwood translations.

  1589. BLAZE, Margaret K. “Life Doesn’t Have to End at Thirty: Some Advice from Kate Chopin, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, Jane Campion and Janet Frame.” MA thesis. University of Wyoming, 1995. 84 pp. Insights from Atwood’s Surfacing plus Chopin’s The Awakening, Drabble’s The Waterfall, Campion’s The Piano, and Frame’s Autobiography.

  1590. BLOOM, Lynn Z., and Veronica MAKOWSKY. “Zenia’s Paradoxes.” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 6.3-4 (1995): 167-179. The Robber Bride. “Despite her devious, ambiguous, and often reprehensible tactics, Zenia is the secret ally of the trio of best friends whom she nominally betrays. Zenia, they maintain, understands and lives by the principle that to survive, to be happy, women must take control of their own lives and bond with other women to make this possible. They show that Zenia repeatedly takes the initiative to provide contexts and confrontations that
ultimately force the women to understand their demeaning, self-destructive attachment to their partners—and so to understand themselves.” (Author).

  1591. BOUSON, J. Brooks. “Slipping Sideways into the Dreams of Women: The Female Dream Work of Power Feminism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 6.3-4 (1995): 149-266. “The article discusses the concept of the female dream work of power feminism in [this] novel….The novel explores women’s collective fantasies of female power through the figure of the villainous Zenia. Openly questioning the radical feminist ideology that views women as free of the will to power, Atwood, in The Robber Bride, reflects on the resurgence of power feminism. The novel does the dream work of power feminism as it focuses attention, through the character of Zenia, on women’s outlawed emotions and repressed fantasies of power and revenge.” (Author).

  1592. BOYNTON, Victoria Anne. “Sexciting Ethos: Women Speakers in Recent North American Writing.” PhD thesis. State University of New York at Binghamton, 1995. 249 pp. “Start with an academic ‘attitude.’ Mix it with Judith Butler’s body theory and Aristotle’s notion of ethos, that messy conjunction of the believability of the speech and the ‘character’ of the speaker. Run it through baths of postmodern developers. Illuminate it with theories of social construction. Project it through a feminist lens. Here’s what you get. You get a view of women speakers situated both within and beyond their conventional versions….You get the site of the sexed female body: exposed, spoken, figured, and invoked as power. This body-site isn’t fixed but is instead dynamic, produced through citations of its governing conven-tions….Women speakers cite their sexed bodies in texts by Jane Tompkins, Nancy Miller, Margaret Atwood, Susan Minot, Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, Rita Dove, Heather McHugh, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Silko, and Paula Gunn Allen.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 56.02 (August 1995): 548.

  1593. BRAIN, Tracy. “Figuring Anorexia: Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 6.3-4 (1995): 299-311. “In [this] novel written in 1965 and published in 1969, Atwood prefigures contemporary debate about the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. Though the word anorexia is never used in the text, Atwood examines the condition and its meanings with a sophistication rarely equalled in subsequent discussions of the illness. Atwood uses anorexia to address issues of gender, language, sexual politics and social dislocation.” (Author).

  1594. BROWN, Jane. “Constructing the Narrative of Women’s Friendship: Margaret Atwood’s Reflexive Fictions.” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 6.3-4 (1995): 197-212. “Atwood’s fiction has always moved women and their concerns from their peripheral places in traditional storytelling to a position of primacy. In her most recent fiction, she gives a central place to a subject that, until recently, has been distinctly peripheral in literature: the friendship of women. In novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, and The Robber Bride, Atwood explores the problem of how it can be possible, amidst the fragmentation and disjunction of the contemporary world, for women to establish community.” (Author).

  1595. BROWN, Lyn Mikel. “The Dangers of Time Travel: Revisioning the Landscape of Girls’ Relationships in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.” Literature, Interpretation, Theory 6.3-4 (1995): 285-298. “The article traces the psychological roots of Elaine’s—the central character of the novel—present-day feelings about herself and her life….It highlights, through Elaine, the trauma of a girl’s life in patriarchal culture; not trauma as people usually think of it—acute emotional crisis or the psychological residues of physical or sexual assault—but the daily barrage of subtle and not-so subtle messages about being female in a male-defined culture that seep into girls’ ears, into their speech, their feelings and thoughts; messages that first turn girls against each other, and then eventually, against themselves.” (Author).

  1596. BRYDON, Diana. “Atwood’s Postcolonial Imagination: Rereading Bodily Harm.” Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels. Ed. Lorraine M. York. Concord, CA: Anansi, 1995. 89-116.

  1597. CAMPBELL, Elizabeth. “Revisions, Reflections, Recreations: Epistolarity in Novels by Contemporary Women.” Twentieth Century Literature 41.3 (Fall 1995): 332ff. Brief discussion of Atwood.

  1598. CANTY, Joan F. “Does Eugenics = (E)utopia? Reproductive Control and Ethical Issues in Contemporary North American Feminist Fabulation.” MA thesis. California State University, Stanislaus, 1995. 99 pp. Includes analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale. For more see MAI 34.03 (June 1996): 970.

  1599. CAPORALE BIZZINI, Silvia. “Power Politics: Literature and Foucauldian Analysis.” In-Between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 5.1 (1995): 23-39. Focus on The Handmaid’s Tale and comparison to Marilyn French’s The Woman’s Room.

  1600. CHEEVER, Leonard A. “Fantasies of Sexual Hell: Manuel Puig’s Pubis Angelical and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Modes of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Twelfth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ed. Robert A. Latham and Robert A. Collins. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. 110-121.

  1601. CHRIST, Carol P. Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. 3rd ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. See especially Chapter 4: “Refusing to Be a Victim: Margaret Atwood.” 41-53. Focus on Surfacing.

  1602. CLARKE, Elizabeth. “How Feminist Can a Handmaid Be? Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” The Discerning Reader: Christian Perspectives on Literature and Theory. Ed. David Barratt, Roger Pooley, and Leland Ryken. Leicester: Apollos; Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995. 235-250.

  1603. COMELLINI, Carla. “The Theme of Displacement in Three Canadian Women Writers: Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood and Edna Alford.” Rivisti di studi canadesi 8 (1995): 145-164.

  1604. COMISKEY, Barbara Anne. “Margaret Atwood: Fiction and Feminisms in Dialogue.” PhD thesis. University of Lancaster, 1995. “Some commentators have been convinced that Atwood’s texts are profoundly ‘feminist’ whilst others regard them as at best noncommittal and at worst misogynistic. This study asks why it might be that Atwood’s works have been received so differently at various times and in different spheres, in terms of specific historical and discursive contexts (Part I) and of the textuality of her novels and short stories and their orientation to diverse ‘reader-figures’ (Part II). Selection of Atwood’s texts in Part II is made from The Edible Woman (1969) to The Robber Bride (1993) and includes her two recent collections of short fiction.” (Author).

  1605. CONRAD, Peter. To Be Continued: Four Stories and Their Survival. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. See especially 32ff. This book is derived from the Alexander Lectures in which, among other things, Conrad traces Chaucer’s influence on The Handmaid’s Tale.

  1606. COOKE, Nathalie. “The Politics of Ventriloquism: Margaret Atwood’s Fictive Confessions.” Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels. Ed. Lorraine M. York. Concord, CA: Anansi, 1995. 207-228.

  1607. COOPER, Pamela. “Sexual Surveillance and Medical Authority in Two Versions of The Handmaid’s Tale.” Journal of Popular Culture 28.4 (Spring 1995): 49-66. In literature and cinema.

  1608. DEVI, N. Rama. “Edibility and Ambiguity in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.” Canadian Literature Today. Ed. R. K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige, 1995.

  1609. DiMARCO, Danette. “Taking Their Word: Twentieth-Century Women Reinvent the Victorian.” PhD thesis. Duquesne University, 1995. 323 pp. Includes discussion of how Atwood’s The Edible Woman revises Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories (1867 and 1971). For more see DAI-A 56.10 (April 1996): 3951.

  1610. DJWA, Sandra. “Back to the Primal: The Apprenticeship of Margaret Atwood.” Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels. Ed. Lorraine M. York. Concord, CA: Anansi, 1995. 13-46.

  1611. EDGECOMBE, Rodney Stenning. “Retrospectives in Patrick White and Margaret Atwood.” Quadrant 39.7-8 (July-August 1995): 85-89.

  1612. ENOS, Jennifer. “What’s in a Name? Zenia and Margaret Atwood’s
The Robber Bride.” Newsletter of the Margaret Atwood Society 15 (1995): 14.

  1613. FAND, Roxanne Joyce. “The Dialogic Self in Novels by Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood.” PhD thesis. University of Hawaii, 1995. 315 pp. “A dialogic view of self as a continuous narrative tension between the integration and diversification of voices is exemplified in theme and form in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City, and Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle….Atwood’s Joan in Lady Oracle, lost in a maze of postmodern multiple personas, mocks herselves with internalized voices of society for avoiding the ‘true’ unitary identity she fears she lacks….Still preoccupied with herselves as objects of her own satire instead of validating them, she remains fixated on unity and disempowered in diversity, inverting and parodying the dialogic process that mobilizes integrity from diverse positions.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 56.05 (November 1995): 1789.

  1614. FILIPCZAK, Dorota. “‘Is There No Balm in Gilead?’ Biblical Intertext in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Literature and Theology at Century’s End. Ed. Gregory Salyer and Robert Detweiler. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1995. 215-233.

  1615. GINSBERG, Robert. “Literature and the Human Substance of Law.” Tamkang Review 25.3-4 (Spring-Summer 1995): 87-110. Compares 4 short stories, including Atwood’s “Weight,” to explore how the literary art draws forth a poignant encounter with the humanity underlying law.

  1616. GOMEZ, Christine. “Creating Female Space in Patriarchal/Colonial Power Structures: A Study of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Literature Today. Ed. R. K. Dhawan. New Delhi: Prestige, 1995. 135-147.

  1617. GRACE, Sherrill E. “‘Franklin Lives’: Atwood’s Northern Ghosts.” Various At-woods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels. Ed. Lorraine M. York. Concord, CA: Anansi, 1995. 146-166.

  1618. GRANOFSKY, Ronald. The Trauma Novel: Contemporary Symbolic Depictions of Collective Disaster. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Lengthy analysis of Surfacing (114-123) plus other relevant aspects of Atwood’s works.