Margaret Atwood

Coral Ann Howells

Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms

Notes

The Handmaid's Tale

A study of Canadian writer Alice Munro--author of the short story collections Dance of the Happy Shades, Open Secrets, Friend of My Youth, and Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You. Discussion of all her major works and a critical overview and analysis of her writing are presented. Of particular importance are issues of race, national, and cultural identity. Also included is a chronology of her life. Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Alice Munro

This collection of essays focuses on Canadian history and its legacies as represented in novels and films in English and French, produced in Canada mainly in the 1980s and 1990s. The approach is both cross-cultural and interdisciplinary, aiming at articulating Canadian differences through a comparison of anglophone and francophone cultures, illustrated by works treating some of the different groups which make up Canadian society - English-Canadian, Québecois, Acadian, Native, and ethnic minorities. The emphasis is on the problematic representation of Canadianness, which is closely bound up with constructions of history and its legacies - dispossession, criminality, nomadism, Gothicism, the Maritime. The English/French language difference is emblematic of Canadian difference; the two-part arrangement, with one section on Literature and the other on Film, sets up the pattern of relationships between the two forms of cultural representation that these essays explore. Essays in the Literature section are on single texts by such writers as: Margaret Atwood, Tomson Highway, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Anne Michaels, and Alice Munro; Gabrielle Roy, Anne Hébert, Antonine Maillet, Bernard Assiniwi, and Régine Robin. The Film section with its mirror structure both supplements and amplifies this dialogue, extending notions of Canadianness with its emphasis on voices from Quebec and Acadia traditionally 'othered' in Canadian history. Filmmakers treated include: Phillip Borsos, Atom Egoyan, Ted Kotcheff, Mort Ransen, and Vincent Ward; Denys Arcand, Gilles Carle, Alanis Obomsawin, Léa Pool, and Jacques Savoie.

Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History

Where are the Voices Coming From?

The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

Eva-Marie Kröller

From Aboriginal writing to Margaret Atwood, this is a complete English-language history of Canadian writing in English and French from its beginnings. The multi-authored volume pays special attention to works from the 1960s and after, to multicultural and Indigenous writing, popular literature, and the interaction of anglophone and francophone cultures throughout Canadian history. Established genres such as fiction, drama and poetry are discussed alongside forms of writing which have traditionally received less attention, such as the essay, nature-writing, life-writing, journalism, and comics, and also writing in which the conventional separation between genres has broken down, such as the poetic novel. Written by an international team of distinguished scholars, the volume includes a separate, substantial section discussing major genres in French, as well as a detailed chronology of historical and literary/cultural events, and an extensive bibliography covering criticism in English and French.

The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature

Feeling in Gothic Fiction

Love, Mystery, and Misery

Margaret Atwood's versatility as a writer and her use of a variety of novel forms from Gothic romance to science fiction are explored in this comprehensive introductory study of her work. Coral Ann Howells arches over and doubles back between Margaret Atwood's writing from the 1970s to the present day in order to indicate the significant continuities beneath her constant shifts of emphasis. Noted for her strong awareness of her own cultural identity as Canadian and a woman, Atwood's fiction nevertheless challenges the limits of such categories.

The field of Margaret Atwood studies, like her own work, is in constant evolution. This second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood provides substantial reconceptualization of Atwood's writing in multiple genres that has spanned six decades, with particular focus on developments since 2000. Exploring Atwood in our contemporary context, this edition discusses the relationship between her Canadian identity and her role as an international literary celebrity and spokesperson on global issues, ranging from environmentalism to women's rights to digital technology. As well as providing novel insights into Atwood's recent dystopias and classic texts, this edition highlights a significant dimension in the reception of Atwood's work, with new material on the striking Hulu and MGM television adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale. This up-to-date volume illuminates new directions in Atwood's career, and introduces students, scholars and general readers alike to the ever-expanding dimensions of her literary art.

The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood

The current Gothic revival in literature and film encourages us to look again to the earliest Gothic novels written beween 1790 and 1820, when Gothic was the most popular kind of fiction in England. Dr. Howells proposes a radical reassessment of these novels to emphasize their importance as experiments in imaginative writing. Her object, the study of feeling, is central to Gothic, for its spell consists in the feelings it arouses and exercises. As pseudo-historical fantasy, Gothic fiction embodies contemporary neuroses, especially sexual fears and repressions, which run right through it and are basic to its conventions. This study traces the effort to articulate these disconcerting emotions in symbol, incident, landscape and architecture. The chronological design suggests developments in Gothic, from the initial explorations of Mrs Radcliffe and M.G. Lewis, through the Minerva Press novelists and Jane Austen's "Northanger Abbey", to new directions taken by C.R. Maturin in "Melmoth the Wanderer" and later by Charlotte Bronte whose "Jane Eyre", arguably the finest of Gothic novels, places the earlier experiments in perspective.

Love, Mystery and Misery

A fully revised critical overview of Atwood's career, emphasising her recent dystopias and the televised adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale.

Ali Cargill

Emma Page

Get everything you need to achieve your full potential at English Literature A Level or AS with York Notes Study Guides, now updated for Assessment Objectives 1 to 5.

YNAL the Handmaid's Tale 2016

Alice Munro is Canada’s greatest short story writer. This book, the first full length study of her work published in Britain, explores the appeal of Munro’s fictions of small-town Canadian life with their precise attention to social surfaces and their fascination with local gossip and scandal. This is a world of open secrets, and Howells highlights Munro’s distinctive storytelling methods which combine the familiar and the unfamiliar, slipping between realism and fantasy to make visible what is usually hidden within everyday life. These are women’s narratives, full of silent female knowledge--of female bodies, love stories and romantic fantasies as well as female casualties. Munro takes up the traditional subjects of women’s fiction through her stories’ significantly female plots, stories of entrapment and escape attempts, where secrecy and silence become strategies of resistance. Munro’s enthusiasm for the work of other women writers from Emily Brontë and L. M. Montgomery to Eudora Welty is emphasized as Munro continues to experiment with the short story form, creating worlds which are both "touchable and mysterious."

Neil McEwan

The most supportive, easy-to-use and focussed literature guides to help your students understand the texts they are studying at GCSE and A Level

Margaret Atwood's international celebrity has given a new visibility to Canadian literature in English. This Companion provides a comprehensive critical account of Atwood's writing across the wide range of genres within which she has worked for the past forty years, while paying attention to her Canadian cultural context and the multiple dimensions of her celebrity. The main concern is with Atwood the writer, but there is also Atwood the media star and public performer, cultural critic, environmentalist and human rights spokeswoman, social and political satirist, and mythmaker. This immensely varied profile is addressed in a series of chapters which cover biographical, textual, and contextual issues. The Introduction contains an analysis of dominant trends in Atwood criticism since the 1970s, while the essays by twelve leading international Atwood critics represent the wide range of different perspectives in current Atwood scholarship.

Coral Ann Howells

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