Margaret Atwood

by Shannon Hengen

  3875. McKAY, Robert. “Identifying with the Animals’: Language, Subjectivity, and the Animal Politics of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing.” Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture. Ed. Mary S. Pollock and Catherine Rainwater. Basingstoke [UK]; New York: Palgrave Mac-millan, 2005. 207-227.

  3876. MESKOVA, Sandra. “Metaliteraturas elementi Margaretas Atvudas un Gundegas Repses proza.” Latvijas Universitates raksti 681.sej: Literaturzinatne un folkloris-tika. Riga, Latvia: Latvijas Universitate, 2005. 77-82. In Latvian.

  3877. MOHR, Dunja M. Worlds Apart: Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005. See especially Chapter 5, “The Poetic Discourse of the Split Self: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale,” 229-269. “Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy, Suzy McKee Charna’s Holdfast series, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are analyzed within the context of this subgenre of ‘transgressive utopian dystopias.’ The analysis focuses particularly on how these works cover the interrelated categories of gender, race and class, along with their relationship to classic literary dualism and the dystopian narrative.” (Publisher).

  3878. PYRHÖNEN, Heta. “Bluebeard’s Accomplice: Rebecca as a Masochistic Fantasy.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 38.3 (September 2005): 149-165. “This article focuses on the Bluebeard Gothic, which is a specific variant of the Gothic romance that uses the Bluebeard fairy tale as its key intertext. Many women authors have used it in order to explore patriarchal power structures. Examples include Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, to name a few. For author Michelle Massé the Gothic romance is about female masochism, as it portrays suffering women whose painful initiations provide some vague pleasure for women authors, characters, and readers.” (Author).

  3879. SNODGRASS, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature. New York: Facts on File, 2005. See especially “Atwood, Margaret (1939– ),” 16-17, and “The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood (1985),” 168-169.

  3880. SPENCER, Guylaine. “The Allure of Atwood’s Toronto.” Americas 57.6 (November-December 2005): 14-21. “Presents information on destinations in the city of Toronto in Ontario used as a setting for novels by Atwood such as the Park Hyatt Hotel [i.e., Park Plaza] in Cat’s Eye; Royal Ontario Museum in Life Before Man; Queen’s Park in Lady Oracle.” (Author).

  3881. SRISERMBHOK, Amporn. “Approaches to Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.” How Far Is America from Here? Selected Proceedings of The First World Congress of The International American Studies Association, 22-24 May 2003. Ed. Theo d’ Haen et al. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2005. 247-261.

  3882. STOREY, Françoise, and Jeff STOREY. “History and Allegory in Margaret At-wood’s Oryx and Crake.” Cycnos 22.2 (2005): 129-138.

  3883. STORROW, Richard F. “The Handmaid’s Tale of Fertility Tourism: Passports and Third Parties in the Religious Regulation of Assisted Conception.” Texas Wesleyan Law Review 12.1 (Fall 2005): 189-211. “Infertility is a devastating global malady triggering worldwide demand for a vast array of reproduction assisting technologies. Infertility is particularly devastating in ‘pronatalist’ societies marked by high rates of infertility and large disparities in access to medical services. Poverty in particular impedes large segments of the population in pronatalist Third World countries from gaining access even to very basic techniques of infertility treatment and consigns them to ineffective traditional remedies. In this Article drawing on both ethnographic work on infertility in the Third World and on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Professor Storrow examines two starkly class-stratified societies where reproduction is regulated by means of rigid adherence to religious doctrine.” (Journal).

  3884. THACKER, Robert. Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005. Includes a number of references to Atwood, showing the relationship between the two writers. Atwood was, for example, crucial in finding Munro an agent.

  3885. TOLAN, Fiona. “Feminist Utopias and Questions of Liberty: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as Critique of Second Wave Feminism.” Women 16.1 (Spring 2005): 18-32. “The Handmaid’s Tale appeared during a period of heightened interest in utopian literature, particularly feminist utopias. Against a backdrop of postmodernist debate, the mid-1980s became a period of evaluation and reinvention for feminism, as a second generation of feminists inherited the second wave. The book uses this moment of transition to evaluate the motives and means of what was becoming an increasingly theorized feminism. To a certain extent, postmodernism can be understood to have grown out of, or at least alongside, anti-utopianism.” (Journal).

  3886. ______. “Situating Canada: The Shifting Perspective of the Postcolonial Other in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” American Review of Canadian Studies 25.3 (Autumn 2005): 453-470. “This article examines Canada’s dual power position in The Robber Bride. Post-colonialism in this book is largely read through the experiences of white women. The author demonstrates that Atwood’s examination of women’s power is frequently employed as a metaphor for Canada’s experience as a postcolonial nation. Atwood articulates a common late-twentieth-century interest in postcolonial discourse, but she translates prevalent postcolonial ideas of difference and otherness to fit her own understanding.” (Journal).

  3887. TU, Shu-shu. “Reinventing Female Subjectivity: The Impulse of Postmodern and Feminist Writing in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” MA thesis. Tamkang University, 2005.

  3888. TURNER, Kate, and Bill FREEDMAN. “Nature as a Theme in Canadian Literature.” Environmental Reviews 13.4 (2005): 169-198. Includes analysis of At-wood’s views on the significance of nature in Canadian literature (Survival) as well as the role of nature in her poetry and some other writing.

  3889. VICKROY, Laurie. “Seeking Symbolic Immortality: Visualizing Trauma in Cat’s Eye.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 38.2 (June 2005): 129-143. “The article investigates how Cat’s Eye, a…novel about an artist’s development, explores the complex interrelationship between trauma, identity, and culture, and specifically, how trauma shapes the construction of the protagonist’s gendered identity and visual sense while her artistic discipline mediates trauma and helps her decipher fantasies perpetuating her emotional stasis.” (Author).

  3890. WELLINGHOFF, Lisa Ann. “Detecting the Author: Narrative Perspective in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” PhD thesis. University of Tulsa, 2005. 195 pp. “Writers are constantly asked to elaborate on their status as writers. Paul Auster, V. S. Nai-paul, and Margaret Atwood all respond to the mystery of that status by asserting their role as authors within their fiction and nonfiction. They extend the mystery of the author by explaining authorship as a game run by the author and played on the reader….Margaret Atwood has publicly explained her role as a writer and the purpose of her novel Alias Grace. Atwood extends the authorship game by presenting the story of Grace, a historical woman accused of murder and a representation of the writer. The writer is a murderess, a con-artist, and an alias.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 66.3 (September 2005): 987.

  3891. WHITE, Roberta. A Studio of One’s Own: Fictional Women Painters and the Art of Fiction. Madison [NJ]: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, ©2005. See especially Chapter 6, “Northern Light: Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye,” 152-173.

  3892. WILLIAMS, Ian. “The Poetics of Tone and Voice in the Poetry of Anne Sexton.” PhD thesis. University of Toronto, 2005. 288 pp. “In literary criticism, the terms tone and voice are used loosely; the first translates generally as mood, and the second as author or style. This dissertation develops a more precise poetics of tone and voice through a study of the work of the American confessional poet, Anne Sexton. Because the terms originate in the contexts of orality and music, I emphasize the oral,
performative cues which are imbedded in poetic diction, and the identity, or presence that is constructed from language. Consequently, in this discussion, language is inseparable from the social context that shapes interpretation and performance.” (Author). To demonstrate the wide applicability of the poetics of tone and voice. Sexton is paired with 4 contemporary poets, including Atwood. For more see DAI-A 66.10 (April 2006).

  3893. WITTKE-RÜDIGER, Petra. Literarische Kartographien des kanadischen Nor-dens. Würzburg [Germany]: Königshausen & Neumann, ©2005. See Chapter 6, “‘Of Mapbreakers and Mapmakers’: Literarische Kartographien des kanadischen Nordens bei Margaret Atwood, Marian Engel und Ann B. Tracy,” 128-261, and especially 6.1, “‘Imitating the Map’: Die öko-feministische Besinnung auf prä-koloniale Mythen in Margaret Atwoods Roman Surfacing,” 129-176.

  3894. WRIGHT, Laura. “National Photographic: Images of Sensibility and the Nation in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 38.1 (March 2005): 75-92. “Psychological frameworks for both a national and sensible ‘imagined community’ are socially transmitted via photographic images and illustrations to the female protagonists of Atwood’s Surfacing and Gordimer’s July’s People. This essay examines the protagonists’ disruption of such visually instilled sensible and colonizing behaviour.” (Journal).

  Reviews of Atwood’s Works

  3895. Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda. Toronto: Key Porter, 2004.

  CM: Canadian Review of Materials 21 January 2005: s.p. By Sylvia PAN-TELEO. (453 w).

  Resource Links 10.4 (April 2005): 1-2. By Adriane PETTIT. (279 w).

  3896. The Blind Assassin. [Sound recording]. Read by Michael O’Brien. Fredericton, NB: BTC Audiobooks, 2005.

  Publishers Weekly 252.39 (3 October 2005): 54. ANON.

  3897. Curious Pursuits: Occasional Writing 1970-2005. London: Virago, 2005.

  Daily Telegraph (Sydney) 23 July 2005: Section: Features: 110. By Anita PUN-TON. (71 w). “It’s interesting to see how Atwood’s feminism became less of a concern as the 20th century rolled on. Fans will find it an engaging read.”

  The Guardian (London): Section: Guardian Saturday Pages: 13. By Natasha WALTER. (973 w).

  The Herald (Glasgow) 7 May 2005: Section: ABC: 5. By Rosemary GORING. (782 w).

  The Independent on Sunday 1 May 2005: Section: Features: 28. By Lesley McDOWELL. (688 w).

  The Observer 8 May 2005: Section: Observer Review Pages: 16. By Stephanie MERRITT. (685 w).

  Scotland on Sunday 1 May 2006: 6. By Anna MILLAR. (498 w).

  The Spectator 14 May 2005: 61. By Caroline MOORE. (1032 w).

  Sunday Business Post 8 May 2005: s.p. By Joanne HAYDEN. (622 w). Available from Lexis-Nexis.

  Sunday Herald 8 May 2005: Section: Seven Days: 35. By Alan TAYLOR. (867 w).

  Sunday Times 15 May 2005: Section: Features: 50. By Peter KEMP. (714 w).

  The Times (London) 23 April 2005: Section: Features: 10. By Joan SMITH. (499 w).

  3898. The Edible Woman. London: Virago, 2005.

  Derby Evening Telegraph 30 September 2005: Section: Features: 38. ANON. (187 w).

  Herizons 18.4 (Spring 2005): 40. By Stacy KAUDER. (257 w).

  3899. The Handmaid’s Tale. [Sound recording]. BBC Audiobooks America, 2004. 3 CDs; 2 cassettes. Unabridged.

  Library Journal 130.10 (1 June 2005): 188. By Laurie SELWYN.

  3900. Le dernier homme. Paris: R. Laffont, 2005. [Oryx and Crake].

  Le Droit 26 March 2005: A20. By Caroline Barrière. (502 w).

  La Presse 1 May 2005: Section: Arts spectacles: 4. By Gilbert GRAND. (111 w).

  3901. Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982-2004. Toronto: Anansi, 2004.

  Malahat Review 150 (Spring 2005): 105-107. By Kitty HOFFMAN.

  3902. Oryx and Crake. Toronto: Emblem, 2005.

  Chronicle of Higher Education 51.36 (13 May 2005): B6-B8. By Martha MONTELLO. Group review.

  Globe and Mail 12 November 2005: D21. By H. J. KIRCHHOFF.

  3903. The Penelopiad. Toronto: Knopf; New York; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005.

  Bookseller 5202 (28 October 2005): 38. Group review. [Ed. note: By the end of 2005, the series included A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, and Weight by Jeanette Winterson.]

  Daily Mail (London) 28 October 2005: Section: 04: 64. By Michael ARDITTI. Includes review of other published titles. Excerpt: “Atwood offers a conventionally feminist slant on the tale of Penelope, the faithful wife who is harassed by a horde of importunate suitors during her husband’s absence at the Trojan War. To outwit them, she promises to make a choice of one of them when she has woven a shroud for her father-in-law, which she then unravels every night. Despite displaying the occasional felicitous phrase, Atwood is writing way below par. The choruses for Penelope’s maids rarely rise above doggerel. Far from revivifying an ancient myth, this is an arch and empty literary conceit.”

  Daily Telegraph (London) 22 October 2005: Section: Books: 006. By David FLUSFEDER. (962 w). A review of the series.

  Edmonton Journal 30 October 2005: E10. By Douglas BARBOUR.

  The Expositor (Brantford, ON) 29 October 2005: D8. By Pat DONNELLY.

  Financial Times (London) 29 October 2005: Section: Weekend Magazine: 30. By Angel GURRIA-QUINTANA. (1320 w). Includes review of Weight by Jeanette Winterson.

  The Gazette (Montreal) 22 October 2005: Section: Arts & Books: H1. By Pat DONNELLY. A review of the series.

  Globe and Mail 22 October 2005: D4. By Donald Harman AKENSON. A review of the series. (2524 w).

  The Guardian (London) 29 October 2005: Section: Guardian Review Pages: 8. By Mary BEARD. (2127 w). One of 4 books reviewed.

  Herald Sun (Melbourne) 5 November 2005: Section: Weekend: W31. By Blanche CLARK. Includes review of Weight by Jeanette Winterson.

  Independent on Sunday 27 November 2005: Section: Features: 20. By Catherine TAYLOR. Includes review of Weight by Jeanette Winterson.

  Korea Herald 8 November 2005: s.p. By Yang SUNG-JIN. Includes review of Weight by Jeanette Winterson. Available from Lexis-Nexis.

  London Review of Books 27.22 (17 November 2005): 23. By Thomas JONES.

  Maclean’s 118.44 (31 October 2005): 74. By Brian BETHUNE.

  National Post 22 October 2005: Section: Weekend Post: WP4. By Gerald Owen.

  National Public Radio 25 November 2005: Show: All Things Considered. By Alan CHEUSE. (376 w). Available from Lexis-Nexis.

  New Statesman 134.4764 (31 October 2005): 48-50. By Simon GOLDHILL. (1073 w). A review of the series.

  New York Times 11 December 2005: Section: 7: 16. By Caroline ALEXANDER. Includes a review of Weight by Jeanette Winterson.

  The Observer 23 October 2005: Section: Observer Review Pages: 17. By Peter CONRAD. (1156 w). A review of the series.

  Ottawa Citizen 23 October 2005: Section: Arts & Books: C5. By Albert WIERSEMA.

  The Province (Vancouver, BC) 30 October 2005: B16. ANON.

  San Diego Union-Tribune 13 November 2005: Section: Books: 5. By Gregory MILLER. Includes review of Weight by Jeanette Winterson.

  The Spectator 22 October 2005: 43-44. By Sam LEITH. (1420 w). A review of the series.

  Sunday Times (London) 23 October 2005: Section: Features: 52. By Lucy HUGHES-HALLETT. (811 w). A review of the series.

  Times Educational Supplement 28 October 2005: Section: Books: 17. By Adele GERAS. (770 w). A review of the series.

  Times-Colonist (Victoria, BC) 30 October 2005: D11. By Pat DONNELLY.

  TLS 5355 (18 November 2005): 23. By Carolyne LARRINGTON. A review of the series.

  Vancouver Sun 22 October 2005: Section: Books: D17. By Sara O’LEARY.

  Washington Post 25 December 2005: Section: Book World: T13. By Elizabeth HAND. Includes a review of Weight by Jeanette Winterson.

  Washington Times 20 November 2005: Section: Books: B08. By Merle RUBIN. Includes a review of Weight by Jeanette Winterson.

&nbs
p; 3904. Writing with Intent. Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose, 1983-2005. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005.

  Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock) 3 July 2005: Section: Travel: s.p. By John FREEMAN. (864 w). Available from Lexis-Nexis.

  Booklist 101.13 (1 March 2005): 1130-1131. By Donna SEAMAN.

  Columbus Dispatch (OH) 5 June 2005: Section: Features: 07. By Margaret QUAMME. (612 w).

  Kirkus Reviews 73.2 (15 January 2005): 91-92. ANON.

  Library Journal 130.5 (15 March 2005): 84. By Nancy R. IVES.

  Publishers Weekly 252.9 (28 February 2005): 56. ANON. (237 w).

  Seattle Times 8 May 2005: Section: Books: J10. By Kimberly Marlowe HARNETT. (471 w).

  Times Union (Albany, NY) 17 July 2005: Section: Travel-Books: J4. By John FREEMAN. (822 w).

  Reviews of Adaptations of Atwood’s Works

  3905. Alias Grace. Directed Laurence Strangio. Performed in Melbourne.

  Herald Sun (Melbourne) 14 June 2005: Section: Arts: 70. By Chris Boyd. (299 w).

  Margaret Atwood on the Web

  Alain Lamothe

  Margaret Atwood is, without a doubt, a popular and prolific author. Throughout the course of her career she has published a plethora of literary works: poems, stories, plays, and novels. Her works have been cited hundreds of times, and she has been the subject of many publications and research projects. This is not to mention the countless awards she has won, as well as the multitude of presentations, speeches, and recitals she has given.

  The level of literature available to her effect can be easily illustrated if one performs a keyword search for the word “Atwood” in the MLA International Bibliography (http://www.mla.org/)—one of the most important informational resources for languages and literature throughout the years (Hysell, 472). Such a search has produced a total of 1,006 citations. If searching for “Margaret Atwood” rather than simply “Atwood,” it reduced the results to 892. This remains an enormous number of citations to browse through. A similar search performed in another useful database for the literary arts, Literature Online (http://lion.chadwyck.com), has yielded more than 850 citations. Furthermore, information detailing Atwood’s life and works can also be found in other electronic products such as Contemporary Authors (http://www.gale.com). Unfortunately, these online databases and services are available by subscription only and at considerable cost, with access typically provided by academic or highly funded public libraries.