Margaret Atwood

by Shannon Hengen

  3239. BRANDON, Paul, and Robert DINSMORE. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: Coles, 2002. vi, 144 pp. Coles notes.

  3240. COLLINGWOOD, Laura Emma. “Masculine Gender Performances in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.” MPhil thesis. University of Birmingham, 2002. 106 pp.

  3241. CONDÉ, Mary. “The Royal Family in Contemporary Women’s Fiction.” Études canadiennes / Canadian Studies 53 (2002): 75-85. Includes some discussion of Cat’s Eye.

  3242. COSTANTINI, Marie-Louise. “[The] Influence of Fairy Tales and Religion on Margaret Atwood’s Novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.” Mémoire de Maîtrise d’Anglais. Université de Corse, 2002. 180 pp.

  3243. COUTURIER-STOREY, Françoise. “Law, the Word of God and Subversion in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Cycnos 19.2 (2002): 135-145.

  3244. DAVISON, Carol. “Margaret Atwood (1939– ).” Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Ed. Douglass H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller, and Frederick S. Frank. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. 24-32.

  3245. DELLAMORA, Richard. “Isabella Valancy Crawford and an English-Canadian Sodom.” Canadian Literature 173 (Summer 2002): 16-32. Dellamora focuses on a short story, “Extradited” by Isabella Valancy Crawford, that Margaret Atwood chose to open The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English. By selecting the story as the point of departure for this collection, Atwood implies that it has something important to say about the emergence of modern Canada. The story suggests that Crawford and some of her readers envisaged the possibility of opening Canadian literature and history to an incarnate “fierce joy” that would find in life not only a “stormy place” and “cloud of mist” but also a spiral towards the light.

  3246. DOUTHAT, Ross, and Selena WARD. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood. New York: Spark Publishing, ©2002. 88 pp. Sparknotes.

  3247. DVORAK, Marta. “The Right Hand Writing and the Left Hand Erasing in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 25.1 (2002): 59-68.

  3248. ECONOMOU-BAILEY, Mary. “Triumphant Survivors: Margaret Atwood’s Heroines.” Canadian Identity through Literature. Ed. Mary Koutsoudaki. Athens: Savalas, 2002. 35-49.

  3249. EVAIN, Christine. “Compromising with the Market Economy.” Newsletter of the Margaret Atwood Society 29 (2002): 3-10, 18, 19. Is, as Atwood contends in Negotiating with the Dead, a writer’s artistic value unrelated to the “money factor”?

  3250. GARBETT, Ann D. “Margaret Atwood.” Great American Writers: Twentieth Century. Vol. 1. Ed. R. Baird Shuman. New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2002. 81-100.

  3251. GARY, Lara Karine. “Motherlands: Re-Imagining Maternal Function in Contemporary Women’s Fiction.” PhD thesis. University of California, Davis, 2002. 218 pp. “This study examines substitute mother-child relationships that inform the narrative strategies of contemporary women writing in English. Works by Margaret Atwood, Shirley Jackson, Marilynne Robinson, and Doris Lessing are the focus of discussions. Feminist readings of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, as well as object-relations theory, intersubjectivity, trauma studies, and theories of women’s autobiography guide the reading of these works. These approaches reveal how some women writers are using the model of substitute mother-child, particularly mother-daughter, relationships to suggest an alternative form of self-making…. Chapter Two explores Alias Grace as a response to Freud’s Dora.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 63.08 (February 2003): 2867.

  3252. GEIS, Deborah R. “Deconstructing (A Streetcar Named) Desire: Gender ReCitation in Belle Reprieve.” American Drama 11.2 (2002): 21-31. Includes analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale.

  3253. GRACE, Sherrill E. Canada and the Idea of North. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2002. Includes multiple references to Atwood’s ideas, as well as specific comments on Strange Things, Surfacing, and Wilderness Tips.

  3254. GREENWOOD, R. “Amazing Grace.” English Review 12.4 (April 2002): 24-25. Teaching Alias Grace to high school students.

  3255. HAMILTON, Nicholas Alexander. “An Ecoclinical Analysis of Margaret At-wood’s Surfacing.” MA thesis. Trent University, 2002. 165 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (2004). “An ecological, interdisciplinary analysis of the novel draws out some interesting relationships between humans, other animals, flora, and the land. The novel’s Narrator explores herself and her past in order to find a point of balance, an understanding of her niche in her environment. This understanding leads her to reject the dominative power relationships which lead to her own and her environment’s exploitation by the power-crazed ‘Americans.’” (Author). For more see MAI 42.01 (February 2004): 59.

  3256. HEILMANN, Ann. “The Devil Herself? Fantasy, Female Identity and the Vil-lainess Fatale in The Robber Bride.” The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film. Ed. Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. 171-182.

  3257. HENGEN, Shannon. “Atwood, Margaret.” Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Ed. William H. New. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 48-51.

  3258. HENIGHAN, Stephen. When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing. Erin: Porcupine’s Quill, 2002. Argues that Canadian writers, including Atwood, now write for a more universal audience. This had led to an evaporation of anything distinctly Canadian in their work. The book has no index so the references to Atwood are scattered hither and yon.

  3259. HIGA, Lisa S. “‘I’m What’s Left Over’: The Genealogy of History in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride.” MA thesis. Arizona State University, 2002. 59 pp.

  3260. HOBGOOD, Jennifer. “Anti-Edibles: Capitalism and Schizophrenia in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.” Style (Northern Illinois University) 36.1 (Spring 2002): 146-168. “Typically, critics have read Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman as either an optimistic celebration of female ‘liberation’ or a materialist feminist protest. But Atwood’s style, primarily her manipulation of a shifting narrative point of view and her use of an unbalanced, tripartite structure, reflects a more complex picture of capitalism and female subjectivity in the 1960s. By varying structural and narrative form within the novel and by using anorexia as a discursive technique, Atwood constructs states of paranoia, decomposition, and schizophrenia to emphasize the dynamic nature of the capitalist system, its exploitative disposition as well as its potential to release female desire from systemic constraint.” (Author).

  3261. HORNER, Avril, and Sue ZLOSNIK. “Agriculture, Body Sculpture, Gothic Culture: Gothic Parody in Gibbons, Atwood and Weldon.” Gothic Studies 4.2 (November 2002): 167-177. Focus on Lady Oracle.

  3262. HOWELLS, Coral Ann. “Margaret Atwood: Twenty-Five Years of Gothic Tales.” Littcrit 28.1 (June 2002): 10-27. [Ed. note: Littcrit published Kariavattom, Trivan-drum, Kerala: Institute of Correspondence Courses, University of Kerala (India).]

  3263. ______. “Margaret Atwood’s Discourse of Nation and National Identity in the 1990s.” The Rhetoric of Canadian Writing. Ed. Conny Steenman-Marcusse. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. 199-216.

  3264. HUMPHREYS, Emyr. “Negotiating with the Living.” New Welsh Review: Wales’s Literary Magazine in English 58 (2002): 28-34. A look at the creative process in Negotiating with the Dead.

  3265. HUNT, Richard. “How to Love This World: The Transpersonal Wild in Margaret Atwood’s Ecological Poetry.” Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction. Ed. J. Scott Byron. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002. 232-244.

  3266. JAMIESON, Sara Louise. “‘There Is No Sadness / I Can’t Enter’: Four Canadian Women Poets and the Contemporary Elegy.” PhD thesis. Queen’s University, 2002. 198 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (2003). “In recent poetry collections by Margaret Atwood, P. K. Page, Margaret Avison, and Lorna Crozier, elegiac themes of death, loss, and consolation have become increasingly prominent. This thesis examines how these poets both reproduce and revise the conventions of a long and varied tradition of elegiac poetry. It participates in an ongoing critical discussion of how c
ontemporary poets preserve and interrogate the conventions of poetic mourning….Each chapter focuses not only on the elegies of a particular poet, but also addresses specific issues arising from a particular type of elegy prominent in that poet’s work [for example] Margaret At-wood’s family elegies....Overall, this study shows women poets engaged in a productive and enabling dialogue with the traditional elegiac canon, and reveals the persistence of elegiac motifs in poems which may initially seem very far removed from elegiac tradition.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 63.10 (April 2003): 3558.

  3267. JONES, Anne G. “Margaret Atwood: Songs of the Transformer, ‘Songs of the Transformed.’” Twayne Companion to Contemporary Literature in English, I: Ammons-Lurie; II: Macleod-Williams. Ed. R. H. W. Dillard and Amanda Cockrell. New York: Twayne; Thomson Gale, 2002. 55-67.

  3268. JURAK, Mirko. “Northrop Frye and Margaret Atwood: On National Identity in Canadian Literature.” Missions of Interdependence: A Literary Directory. Ed. Gerhard Stilz. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. 23-34.

  3269. LENK, Uta. “Konzeptuelle Metaphern Zu Sprache in Literarischen Texten: Möglichkeiten Einer Interdisziplinären Anglistik.” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 27.1 (2002): 51-68. Discusses The Handmaid’s Tale (and a few other titles) in connection with teaching of literature in Germany.

  3270. LI, Tsui Yan. “The Female Self, Body and Food: Strategies of Resistance in Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Zhang Jie and Xi Xi.” PhD thesis. Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. 239 pp. “Since numerous ideologies exist in society, women are subjected to the influence of many ideologies, such as feminism and individualism, and not just patriarchal culture. The conflicting beliefs among the ideologies open up the possibilities for women to resist the patriarchal rule so as to assert the female self. In…Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle…the female protagonists seek to assert the female self by adopting different strategies to resist the biased assumptions hidden in traditional representations of the female self encoded in body and food. There is a necessity of women’s strategies of resistance against the stereotyping of femininity in order to construct an independent self that is liberated from the patriarchal rule.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 63.10 (April 2003): 3549.

  3271. LOVELL-SMITH, Rose. “Anti-Housewives and Ogres’ Housekeepers: The Roles of Bluebeard’s Female Helper.” Folklore 113.2 (October 2002): 197-214. While not directly about Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg,” this article makes some reference to it.

  3272. LUCOTTI, Claudia. “La voz que nos ocupa: Cuatro lecturas de la poesía de Margaret Atwood.” MA thesis. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2002. 174 pp.

  3273. MacPHERSON, Heidi Slettedahl. “‘What Is the Narrative of Us?’ Teaching Canadian Texts as North American Literature.” Journal of Commonwealth and Post-colonial Studies 9.1 (2002): 7-22. Atwood is the prime example.

  3274. MAK, Elaine, Ngah Lam. “Eugenics in Dystopian Novels.” MPhil thesis. University of Hong Kong, 2002. 147 pp. A study of The Handmaid’s Tale as well as Charlotte Franken Haldane’s Man’s World, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Deed. Full text available from Hong Kong Theses Online: http://sunzi1.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/index.jsp.

  3275. MASSOURA, Kiriaki. “The Relationship of Food to Body and Language in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.” Passages to Canada: Eighteen Essayistic Routes / Passages vers Le Canada: Dix huit routes essaylistique. Proceedings of the European Student Seminars on Graduate Work in Canadian Studies. Ed. Mar-kus Müller, Robert Chr. Thomsen, and David Parris. Brno [Czech Republic]: Ma-saryk UP, 2002. 63-73.

  3276. McCLENAGAN, Cindy Marlow. “The Postmodern End for the Violent Victorian Female.” PhD thesis. Texas Tech University, 2002. 164 pp. “Recent media attention on the trial and conviction of Andrea Yates, the Texas woman convicted of drowning her five children, as well as on female suicide bombers in Israel, indicates not only ‘a morbid curiosity in the United States relating to mothers killing their children’…but also a special, intense fascination with women who involve themselves in ‘masculine’ acts of violence, especially murder. Since contemporary examples of violent women abound, why do authors—and the public—continue to turn to the past, to nineteenth-century cases of female aggression, for inspiration? Perhaps it is as Margaret Atwood suggests [in Alias Grace], that in turning to the past we hope to explore and then expose the possible misconstruction of that past, thereby infusing it with multi-layered meanings for present and future generations.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 63.10 (April 2003): 3550.

  3277. McELROY, Ruth. “Whose Body, Whose Nation? Surrogate Motherhood and Its Representation.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 5.3 (2002): 325-342. In The Handmaid’s Tale.

  3278. MICHEL, Anthony J. “Cultural Rhetorics: Writing and Disciplinarity at the Intersection of British Cultural Studies and Rhetoric.” PhD thesis. Michigan State University. Program in American Studies, 2002. 161 pp. “This project reads scholarship on the intersections of cultural studies and composition to argue that the counterdisciplinary emphasis of British cultural studies has been eliminated in US composition and rhetoric studies. In response to the de-politicization of cultural studies that results from the elimination of concerns over disciplinarity, this project advocates a strategic recovery of British cultural studies and demonstrates how the counterdisciplinary focus of cultural studies helps intervene in contemporary scholarship in composition and rhetoric. This project then demonstrates the uses of cultural rhetorics, for composition scholarship and pedagogy, through critical readings of Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace and Julie Dash’s film, Daughters of the Dust.” For more see DAI-A 63.09 (March 2003): 3175.

  3279. MILLER, Ryan. “The Gospel According to Grace: Gnostic Heresy as Narrative Strategy in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” Literature and Theology 16.2 (2002): 172-187.

  3280. MOORE, Emily Ruth. “Plots, Paradoxes and Parodies: Women Writers Rewriting ‘Bluebeard.’” PhD thesis. City University of New York, 2002. 244 pp. “In this study, I examine the plots, paradoxes and parodies in re-visions of one fairy tale— ‘Bluebeard,’ written by Charles Perrault in 1697—in selected works written mainly by women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Charlotte Brontë, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Shirley Jackson, Angela Carter, Suniti Namjoshi, Joyce Carol Oates, and Margaret Atwood.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 62.12 (June 2002): 4146.

  3282. MURRAY, Jennifer. “Questioning the Triple Goddess: Myth and Meaning in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Canadian Literature 173 (Summer 2002): 72-90. “Atwood’s The Robber Bride calls upon mythological intertexts in two different ways: first of all, by echoing preexisting texts, mythical references make actions, characters, themes and structures pleasantly recognizable to the reader. The second function of myth is to frame meaning within boundaries as well as to set it up as something that is not limited in possibilities. This use of mythical intertext, Murray argues, is the restriction which prevents the novel from opening up to the reader a range of potentially radical positions.” (Author).

  3283. NISCHIK, Reingard M. “Von Guten Knochen und Mord im Dunklen: Margaret Atwoods inverse Poetik intertextueller Winzigkeit.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 52.3 (2002): 401-416.

  3284. NISCHIK, Reingard M., ed. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Toronto: Anansi; Rochester, NY; Columbia, SC: Camden House; Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2002. Reprint of 2000 edition.

  3285. PAILLOT, Patricia. “To Bind or Not to Bind: Irony in The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood.” Études canadiennes / Canadian Studies: Revue interdisciplinaire des études canadiennes en France 53 (2002): 117-126.

  3286. POOLE, Ralph J. Delikate Damen: Zur Symptomatik des weiblichen Körpers im Werk Margaret Atwoods. Frankfurt am Main: Hänsel-Hohenhausen, 2002. On eating disorders in Atwood’s writing.

  3287. PURDY, Anthony. “Unearthing the Past: The Archaeology of Bog Bodies in Glob, Atwood, Hébert and Drabble.” Textual Practice 16.3 (Winter 2002): 44
3-458. At-wood’s short story, “The Bog Man,” compared to Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska, Margaret Drabble’s A Natural Curiosity, and Peter Vilhelm Glob’s Mosefolket.

  3288. RAO, Eleonora. Heart of a Stranger: Contemporary Women Writers and the Metaphor of Exile. Naples: Liguori, 2002. See especially Chapter 5, “Margaret Atwood’s Later Fiction,” [107]-119. In spite of the title, this chapter focuses on Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride.

  3289. REESE, James D. “Learning for Understanding: The Role of World Literature.” English Journal 91.5 (May 2002): 63-69. “Units of work that use world literature to improve high school students’ global understanding in an International Baccalaureate English course are presented. The units require students to study Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood; If This Is a Man, by Primo Levi; and The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy. The three units address the overarching goals that concern how and why students should develop their critical reading and thinking ability, how literature can open their minds to new ways of seeing the world, and how learning about different cultures and eras can help them to understand their own world. Specific goals for understanding for each unit focus on the book being studied and also refer to the three overarching goals.” (Journal).