Margaret Atwood

by Shannon Hengen

  315.GEORGE, Jacqueline A. “The Mirror’s Frame: A Study of the Unifying Framework of Experience, Symbol and Metaphor in the Development of Identity and Self-Knowledge in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.” MA thesis. St. Bonaventure University (NY), 1989.

  316.GIVNER, Jessie. “Mirror Images in Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle.” Studies in Canadian Literature 41.1 (1989): 139-146. Recognizes a relationship between Lady Oracle and Irigaray’s feminist theory. Examines the unconventional use of mirrors and the recurring use of loose ends, disrupted frames, and ellipses.

  317.GODARD, Barbara. “Palimpsest: Margaret Atwood’s Bluebeard’s Egg.” Recher-ches Anglaises et Nord-Américaines 20 (1987): 51-60. A shift in Atwood’s narrative techniques of embedding and mise en abyme creates an illusion of deepened “human understanding.”

  318.GRIESINGER, Emily Ann. “Before and After Jane Eyre: The Female Gothic and Some Modern Variations.” PhD thesis. Vanderbilt University, 1989. 417 pp. Surfacing is one of the novels examined to illustrate that the modern female gothic often entails rejection or revision of the earlier tradition. For more see DAI-A 51.02 (August 1990): 511.

  319.HARKNESS, David L. “Alice in Toronto: The Carrollian Intertext in The Edible Woman.” Essays on Canadian Writing 37 (Spring 1989): 103-111. Identifies and explicates a series of intertextual links between Lewis Carroll’s work and The Edible Woman.

  320.HEIDENREICH, Rosmarin. The Postwar Novel in Canada: Narrative Patterns and Reader Response. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1989. See especially “Social Norms and Perspectival Patterns. Graduated Perspectives: Margaret At-wood’s The Edible Woman.” 22-28. The novel’s characters represent a group of perspectives, or norms, to be explored, not a hierarchical ordering of perspectives.

  321.HIRSCH, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington, IL; Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1989. See especially “Feminist Family Romances. Life before Oedipus: Atwood’s Surfacing.” 140-145. This section examines how Surfacing “exemplifies and puts into question” the feminist family romance of revisionary psychoanalytic theories.

  322.HITE, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative. Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell UP, 1989. See especially “Other Side, Other Woman: Lady Oracle.” 127-167. Lady Oracle’s two-sided story of self and other, reality and unreality, with its Gothic elements, and Irigara-yan otherness, succeeds in creating “representation with a difference.”

  323.HOEPPNER, Kenneth. “Frye’s Theory of Romance, Popular Romance and At-wood’s Lady Oracle.” ACLALS Bulletin 8.1 (1989): 74-87.

  324.HOWELLS, Coral Ann. “Free-Dom, Telling, Dignidad: Margaret Laurence, ‘A Gourdful of Glory,’ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, Sarah Murphy, The Pleasure of Miranda.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 12.1 (Autumn 1989): 39-46.

  325.HUGGAN, Graham. “Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction.” PhD thesis. University of British Columbia, 1989. At-wood is discussed as one of “three significant precursors of the contemporary period of literary cartography.” For more see DAI-A 50.12 (June 1990): 3941.

  326.______. “Resisting the Map as Metaphor: A Comparison of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Janet Frame’s Scented Gardens for the Blind.” Kunapipi 11.3 (1989): 5-15. Atwood and Frame challenge the status of map as metaphor, reacting against authoritarian representation and strategies of restriction in the notion of mapping.

  327.HUTCHEON, Linda. Afterword to The Edible Woman. New Canadian Library, Ed. David Staines. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. 313-319. Sees The Edible Woman as a “kind of model” for Atwood’s following work. The delicate balance of the ironic and serious is the “mark of Atwood’s already mature writing.”

  328.JONES, Dorothy. “Not Much Balm in Gilead.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 11.2 (Spring 1989): 31-43.

  329.KALB, John Douglas. “Articulated Selves: The Attainment of Identity and Personal Voice through Language and Storytelling in Works by Twentieth-Century American Authors.” PhD thesis. Michigan State University, 1989. 254 pp. Atwood is one of several authors who illustrate this process. For more see DAI-A 50.07 (January 1990): 2053.

  330.KALER, Anne K. “‘A Sister, Dipped in Blood’: Satiric Inversion of the Formation Techniques of Women Religious in Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale.” Christianity and Literature 38.2 (Winter 1989): 43-62. Handmaid’s Tale incorporates Frye’s groups of fiction (satire, fantasy, etc.) through a framework of inversions of pre-Vatican II religious tradition. The historical notes section is an inversion of scholarship.

  331.KAUFFMAN, Linda. “Special Delivery: Twenty-first Century Epistolarity in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature. Ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1989. 221-244. “Forms of masculine writing vs. feminine speech” in Handmaid’s Tale belong to the tradition of epistolary literature. The novel combines epistolary poetics with apocalyptic politics.

  332.KEITH, W. J. “Margaret Atwood.” A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada. Toronto: ECW Press, 1989. 175-194.

  333.______. Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman: A Reader’s Guide (Canadian Fiction Studies 3) Toronto: ECW Press, 1989. 79.

  334.KETTERER, David. “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: A Contextual Dystopia.” Science Fiction Studies 16.2 (July 1989): 209-217. The preceding and succeeding historical circumstances in Handmaid’s Tale make it a unique work of contextual dystopia. This quality is overlooked in Mary McCarthy’s negative review.

  335.KIZUK, A. R. “The Father’s No and the Mother’s Yes: Psychological Intertexts in Davies’s What’s Bred in the Bone and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Atlantis 14.2 (Spring 1989): 1-9. Unstable structures and self-interpreting devices in these fictional biographies by Atwood and Davies subvert modern psychological “truths” and myths.

  336.LANE, Patrick. “The Unyielding Phrase.” Canadian Literature 122-123 (Autumn-Winter 1989): 57-64. Atwood and Newlove shock the reader into understanding and use history to create their imagined truths. Atwood’s reimagined The Journals of Susanna Moodie relates Moodie’s “failure of the imagination” and inability to be “transformed.”

  337.LARSON, Janet L. “Margaret Atwood and the Future of Prophecy.” Religion and Literature 21.1 (Spring 1989): 27-61. The Handmaid’s Tale adds to feminist biblical hermeneutics by expanding the prophetic tradition and exposing its patriarchal roots.

  338.LECKER, Robert, Jack DAVID, and Ellen QUIGLEY, eds. Canadian Writers and Their Works. Toronto: ECW Press, Fiction Series 2 (1989) passim. Discusses At-wood’s comments on wild animals as a theme in Canadian literature.

  339.LECLAIRE, Jacques. “Enclosure and Disclosure in Surfacing by Margaret At-wood.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 11.2 (Spring 1989): 18-23.

  340.LEWOCHKO, Mary. “Circular Patterns of Change in the Feminine Quest for Self-Identity in the Novels of Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro.” MA thesis. Concor-dia University, 1989. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1990).

  341.LUCAS, Linda E. “The Reconstructive Vision of the Third Eye in Margaret At-wood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” MA thesis. University of Western Ontario, 1989. 113 pp.

  342.MANDERSON, Jill. “The Nameless Voice: A Comparison of Narrative Voice in Margaret Atwood’s Early Poems and Surfacing.” MA thesis. Dalhousie University, 1989. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1990).

  343.McCOMBS, Judith. “Country, Politics, and Gender in Canadian Studies: A Report from Twenty Years of Atwood Criticism.” Literatures in Canada/Littératures au Canada. Ed. Deborah C. Poff. Montreal: Association for Canadian Studies, 1989. 27-47.

  344.______. “‘Up in the Air So Blue’: Vampires and Victims, Great Mother Myth and Gothic Allegory in Margaret Atwood’s First, Unpublished Novel.” Centennial Review 33.3 (Summer 1989): 251-257. The Great Mother myth and Gothic elements are predominant in Atwood’s f
irst unpublished novel. These themes are reformulated in the The Edible Woman.

  345.MEINDL, Dieter. “Gender and Narrative Perspective in Margaret Atwood’s Stories.” Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Américaines 22 (1989): 5-15.

  346.NAGY, Erzsébet. “Possible Approaches to Translation Analysis: Margaret At-wood, Surfacing. “ MA thesis. Eötvös Lorand University, 1989.

  347.NEW, W. H. A History of Canadian Literature. London: Macmillan, 1989. passim. Many scattered references; survey-essay on Atwood. 292-295.

  348.PALMER, Paulina. Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory. New York; London; Toronto; Sydney; Tokyo: Harvester Wheat-sheaf, 1989. passim. Most of Atwood’s novels are discussed with particular attention to Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale.

  349.PATTERSON, Helen Jayne. “A World of Women’s Words: Elements of Form in the Poetry of Margaret Atwood.” PhD thesis. York University, 1989. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1989). A “stylistic, psychological, and semiotic” analysis of Atwood’s feminist writing. For more see DAI-A 50.09 (March 1990): 2902.

  350.PATTON, Marilyn. “Cannibal Craft: The Eaten Body in the Writings of Herman Melville and Margaret Atwood.” PhD thesis. University of California at Santa Cruz, 1989. 446 pp. In a study of cannibalism as narrative trope, uncovers the major cultural concerns in Atwood’s novels through Bodily Harm. For more see DAI-A 50.09 (March 1990): 2899.

  351.PEEL, Ellen. “Subject, Object, and the Alternation of First- and Third-Person Narration in Novels by Alther, Atwood, and Drabble: Toward a Theory of Feminist Aesthetics.” Critique 30.2 (Winter 1989): 107-122. Alternating narration is part of a “feminist aesthetic” that examines the self/other problem in Kinflicks, The Edible Woman, and The Waterfall.

  352.POEHLS, Alice O’Toole. “Repetition and Reading: Word Rhythms in Henry James and Margaret Atwood.” PhD thesis. University of North Dakota, 1989. 170 pp. “This study develops a method of reading the novel which emphasizes single-word repetitions as they rhythmically occur in the artistic text. By analyzing these word rhythms, a reader can disrupt the habitual production of the novel based on the fictional events of the story and, instead, focus on the textual events of the artistic form. Chapter Four presents a reading of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. At-wood’s text evokes Sigmund Freud’s essay, ‘The Uncanny,’ by performing the uncanny, both as a theme and as an experience for the reader and/or the narrator. Examination of word rhythms in the text, however, demonstrates that Freudian associations, like all linguistic forms, are relational and subjective. The psychic and geographic journeys of the narrator in Surfacing are much like the reader’s journey through the novel: recollection and repetition continually subsidize the text.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 51.01 (July 1990): 164.

  353.QUINN, Antoinette. “Atwood and Autobiography: The Opening Sequence of Murder in the Dark.” Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Américaines 22 (1989): 17-25.

  354.RAO, Eleonora. “Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle: Writing Against Notions of Unity.” British Journal of Canadian Studies 4.1 (1989): 136-156. Atwood’s “revised version of Gothic Romance” challenges genre hierarchies and conventional iconography of woman, breaks down generic representations of character, and emphasizes plural subjectivity.

  355.ROBERTS, Claudette M. “Presence, Absence, and the Interface in Twentieth-Century Literature and Painting.” PhD thesis. Ohio State University, 1989. 186 pp. Presence and absence are no longer viewed as binary opposites; several juxtapositions, including Atwood and Picasso, are used as demonstrations. For more see DAI-A 51.03 (September 1990): 843.

  356.ROOKE, Constance. “Atwood’s Hands.” Fear of the Open Heart: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Writing. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1989. 163-174. Describes many of the hand images found in Atwood which Rooke sees as part of the language Atwood uses.

  357.______. “Interpreting The Handmaid’s Tale: Offred’s Name and ‘The Arnolfini Marriage.’” Fear of the Open Heart: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Writing. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1989. 175-196. Makes case for June being Offred’s real name; discusses novel’s similarities to this van Eyck painting.

  358.RUBENSTEIN, Roberta. “Bodily Harm: Paranoid Vision in Contemporary Fiction by Women.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 1.1-2 (1989): 137-149. Discusses multidimensional interpretations of women’s hostile worlds in Bodily Harm, The Handmaid’s Tale, and works by Lessing, Drabble, and others.

  359.SCHENK, Susan Jean. “‘Burning Dinner Is Not Incompetence but War’: Marriage and Madness in Contemporary Domestic Fiction.” PhD thesis. University of Western Ontario, 1989. Sixteen novels by various writers, including Atwood, are examined. For more see DAI-A 50.05 (November 1989): 1315.

  360.SCOBIE, Stephen. Signature Event Cantext. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1989. passim. Mentions Atwood a few times, with main focus on The Journals of Susanna Moodie as a “documentary poem,” which is viewed as distinctly Canadian.

  361.SPRIET, Pierre. “Margaret Atwood’s Post-Modernism in Murder in the Dark.” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 11.2 (Spring 1989): 24-30.

  362.STURGESS, Charlotte. “Subtexts of Displacement in Margaret Atwood’s Dancing Girls and Other Stories.” Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Américaines 22 (1989): 27-32.

  363.TOMPKINS, Cynthia Margarita. “The Spiral Quest in Selected Inter-American Female Fictions: Gabrielle Roy’s La Route d’Altamont, Marta Lynch’s La Señora Ordonez, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, and Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, United States).” PhD thesis. Pennsylvania State University, 1989. 289 pp. Reveals “the absence of the public sphere,” and a cross-cultural, gender-oriented “intermediate stage of the female Bildungsroman,” in women’s spiral quest novels. For more see DAI-A 50.07 (January 1990): 2045.

  364.WAUGH, Patricia. Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. See especially “Contemporary Women Writers: Challenging Postmodernist Aesthetics. Margaret Atwood.” 179-189. Body image and food images form the discussion of The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle; At-wood mentioned in passing elsewhere in book also.

  365.WEINER, Deborah. “‘Difference That Kills’/Difference That Heals: Representing Latin America in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop and Margaret Atwood.” Comparative Literature East and West: Traditions and Trends. Selected Conference Papers. Literary Studies: East and West, Vol. 1. Ed. Cornelia Moore and Raymond A. Moody. Honolulu: College of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, University of Hawaii and the East-West Center, 1989. 208-219. Contrasts difference, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics; Atwood’s True Stories breaks down dichotomies, producing a “stronger and more resilient affirmation.”

  366.WILSON, Sharon R. “Fairy-Tale Cannibalism in The Edible Woman.” Cooking by the Book: Food in Literature and Culture. Ed. Mary Anne Schofield. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. 78-88. Identifies Atwood’s use of a fairy-tale intertext focused on food, tracing patterns from “The Robber Bridegroom” and “Fitcher’s Bird” in The Edible Woman.

  367.WORKMAN, Nancy V. “Sufi Mysticism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Studies in Canadian Literature 14.2 (1989): 10-26.

  368.YARNALL, Judith H. “The Transformations of Circe: The History of an Archetypal Character.” PhD thesis. McGill University, 1989. In the 20th century, Atwood and Joyce brought about a more positive view of Circe. For more see DAI-A 50.04 (October 1989): 943.

  Reviews of Atwood’s Works

  369.Best American Short Stories. Selected by Margaret Atwood with Shannon Rave-nel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

  Hartford Courant (CT) 29 October 1989. NewsBank 1989: 104: F12. By Robert DAHLIN.

  Library Journal 114.17 (15 October 1989): 101. By Frank PISNO.

  New York Times 15 November 1989: C25. By Nona BALAKIAN.

  Oregonian (Portland) 10 December 1989. NewsBank 1990: 1: D10-11. By Paul PINTARICH.

  Philadelphia Inquirer
24 December 1989. NewsBank 1990: 1: D12-13. By Andrew LEVY.

  Publishers Weekly 236.10 (8 September 1989): 63. By Penny KAGANOFF.

  Sun (Baltimore) 19 November 1989. NewsBank 1989: 121: C1. By Joan MOONEY.

  Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA) 24 December 1989. NewsBank 1990: 1: D14. By Sharon Lloyd STRATTON.

  370.Cat’s Eye. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988; New York: Doubleday, 1988; London: Bloomsbury, 1988.

  America 160 (6 May 1989): 435-437. By Richard BAUTCH.

  Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 19 March 1989: s.p. (930 w). ANON. Available from Lexis-Nexis.

  Atlanta Journal 19 March 1989: M10. By Chris VERNER.

  Book of the Month Club News Spring 1989: 2-3.

  Books (London) 22 January 1989: 17. By Kate PULLINGER.

  Boston Globe 29 January 1989: Section: Books: A14. By Gail CALDWELL. (1123 w).

  Boston Herald 22 January 1989. NewsBank 1989: 13: C10. By Judith WYNN.

  Chicago Tribune 29 January 1989: Section 14: 6. By Jody DAYNARD.

  Christian Science Monitor 20 April 1989: 11. By Marilyn GARDNER.

  CM 17.1 (January 1989): 15. By Joanne K. A. PETERS.

  Cosmopolitan 206.2 (February 1989): 52. By Louise BERNIKOW.

  Daily News (New York) 5 March 1989. NewsBank 1989: 34: D7-8. By Sherryl CONNELLY.

  Economist 311 (6 May 1989): 88.

  The Guardian (London) 27 January 1989: s.p. By Stephen FENDER. (674 w). Available from Lexis-Nexis.

  The Guardian (London) 12 April 1989: 17. By Elayne RAPPING.

  Hartford Courant (CT) 12 February 1989. NewsBank 1989: 25: B11. By Jocelyn McCLURG.

  Houston Chronicle 5 March 1989. NewsBank 1989: 34: D9.

  The Independent 28 January 1989: Section: Weekend Books: 29. By Jill NEVILLE. (537 w).

  Inside Books February 1989: 19, 21. By Barbara MITCHELL.

  Jerusalem Post 7 April 1989: Section: Book: s.p. By Frances GERTLER. (896 w). Available from Lexis-Nexis.

  Jerusalem Post 29 December 1989: Section: Book: s.p. By S. T. MERAVI.