Margaret Atwood

by Shannon Hengen

  1350. GILBERT, Sandra M., and Susan GUBAR. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 3: Letters from the Front. New Haven, CT; London: Yale UP, 1994. passim. Atwood discussed in several sections, especially The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle.

  1351. GILBERT-MACEDA, Ma Teresa. “Madres e hijas en la narrativa de Margaret Atwood.” Estudios de la mujer en el ámbito de los países de habla inglesa. Ed. Margarita Ardanaz et al. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1994. 333-340.

  1352. GLASBERG, Ronald P. “The Dynamics of Domination: Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue canadienne de littéra-ture comparée 21.4 (December 1994): 679-693. Sees the 3 accounts as variations on a theme with elements in common; although Atwood’s is fiction, the other two works are literary nonfiction.

  1353. GODARD, Barbara. “My (m)Other, My Self: Strategies for Subversion in Atwood and Hébert.” Canadian Literature: Recent Essays. Ed. Manorama Trikha. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 1994. 149-164. Based on a lecture delivered in 1981. Focus on Lady Oracle.

  1354. GOLDENSOHN, Barry. “Euridice Looks Back.” American Poetry Review 23 (November-December 1994): 43-52. Goldensohn “examines poetic representations of the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus and argues that in a century when the understanding of women’s lives is changing so dramatically, Eurydice’s voice can be very attractive to the poet once she is transformed from the passive, sentimental victim to something else—usually a defiant, angry woman, or one more passionate about death than love. Analyzing several poems that employ the myth, including those of Atwood, he finds that in all of them Eurydice and Orpheus mirror a complex debate that reflects the enormous change in the status of women and women artists.” (Journal).

  1355. GOMEZ, Christine. “From Being an Unaware Victim to Becoming a Creative Non-victim: A Study of Two Novels of Margaret Atwood.” Perspectives on Canadian Fiction. Ed. Sudhakar Pandey. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1994. 73-93. The Edible Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale.

  1356. GORING, Rosemary, ed. Larousse Dictionary of Literary Characters. Edinburgh; New York: Larousse, 1994. Contains entries for characters from Atwood’s first 7 novels.

  1357. GRACE, Sherrill E. “Atwood, Margaret (Eleanor).” The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamilton. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 20-21. Biographical reference.

  1358. ______. “Gender as Genre: Atwood’s Autobiographical ‘I.’” Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays. Ed. Colin Nicholson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 189-203. This theme is especially present in Lady Oracle, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Cat’s Eye.

  1359. ______. “Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom: Urban/Rural Codes in Roy, Laurence and Atwood.” Canadian Literature Recent Essays. Ed. Manorama Trikha. New Delhi: Pencraft International, 1994. 149-164.

  1360. GRANT, Cynthia, Susan SEAGROVE, and Peggy SAMPLE. “‘Penelope’ Based on the “Circe / Mud Cycle” by Margaret Atwood.” Canadian Theatre Review 78 (Spring 1994): 42-58. “A documentation of the process and three productions of this work inspired by the poetry of Margaret Atwood, Greek tragedy and epics.”

  1361. GREGORY, Eileen. “Dark Persephone and Margaret Atwood’s Procedures for Underground.” Images of Persephone: Feminist Readings in Western Literature. Ed. Elizabeth T. Hayes. Gainesville; Tallahassee; Tampa; Boca Raton; Pensacola; Orlando; Miami; Jacksonville: UP of Florida, 1994. 136-152. Examines the representation of underground in Atwood’s poetry.

  1362. HANSOT, Elisabeth. “Selves, Survival, and Resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Utopian Studies 5.2 (1994): 56-69. Includes a discussion of the public persona of the handmaid in the book, the distinction between memory and dream and how the element of resistance was portrayed.

  1363. HARKER, John W. “‘Plain Sense’ and ‘Poetic Significance’: Tenth-Grade Readers Reading Two Poems.” Poetics: Journal for Empirical Research on Literature, the Media and the Arts 22.3 (1994): 199-218.

  1364. HOLLINGER, Veronica. “Putting on the Feminine: Gender and Negativity in Frankenstein and The Handmaid’s Tale.” Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality. Ed. Daniel Fischlin. Dordrecht: Kluwer Acad, 1994. 203-224.

  1365. HORNE, H. “Revisionist Mythmaking: The Use of the Fairy Tale Motif in the Works of Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood and Anne Sexton.” MLitt thesis. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1994.

  1366. HOWELLS, Coral. “Cat’s Eye: Elaine Risley’s Retrospective Art.” Margaret At-wood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays. Ed. Colin Nicholson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 204-218. The paintings and the retrospective exhibition provide a means to examine the female as a subject in various forms of autobiography.

  1367. ______. “Margaret Atwood’s Canadian Signature: From Surfacing and Survival to Wilderness Tips.” British Journal of Canadian Studies 9.2 (1994): 205-215.

  1368. HUGGAN, Graham. Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction. Toronto; Buffalo, NY; London: University of Toronto Press, 1994. passim. Several passages in which Surfacing and The Handmaid’s Tale are discussed in terms of their charting a course in a search for identity.

  1369. HUNG, Mei-hwa. “In Search of Female Self in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing.” MA thesis. Tamkang University, 1994. 91 pp.

  1370. JACOBSOHN, Rachel W. The Reading Group Handbook: Everything You Need to Know, from Choosing Members to Leading Discussions. New York: Hyperion, 1994. Atwood works appear on several suggested lists.

  1371. JOHNSON, Constance Hochstein. “The Journey: Walking with Mary Oliver, Margaret Atwood, and Adrienne Rich.” MA thesis. Hamline University, 1994. 69 pp.

  1372. KAUR, Iqbal. Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing: A Critical Study. Chandigarh [India]: Arun, ©1994.

  1373. KEEFER, Janice Kulyk. “Hope against Hopelessness: Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man.” Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays. Ed. Colin Nicholson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 153-176. Analyzes the bleakness of this novel, especially its place in the progression of Atwood’s fiction.

  1374. KEITH, W. J. “Interpreting and Misinterpreting ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’: A Cautionary Tale.” Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays. Ed. Colin Nicholson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 248-257. Relates experience in reading an essay on “Bluebeard’s Egg”; in doing so, makes point of necessity of reading what the story really says and not fitting the story to a theory.

  1375. LAHAIE, Christiane. “Alice s’en va au cinéma, ou comment museler le roman féministe [Alice Goes to the Movies, Or How to Muzzle the Feminist Novel].” Re-cherches Feministes 7.2 (1994): 81-94. “Turning a novel into a film is never easy, especially when the novel is a feminist one. In that case, narrative structures may express subversion through female protagonists’ discourse or non-discourse. But does the difficulty result from the medium’s limitations, or from dominant cinematic habits which usually depict women solely as objects of male discourse? An analysis of Laura Laur by Suzanne Jacob and its cinematographic version by Brigitte Sauriol, as well as of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Volker Schlöndorff’s movie, should allow us to verify the following hypothesis: Laura Laur and Offred, two exceptional fictional protagonists, become victims of underexposure when becoming stars of the big screen.” (Journal summary).

  1376. LAL, Malashri. “‘What Home Shall a Woman Find?’ A Feminist Critique of Margaret Atwood and Anita Desai.” The India-Canada Relationship: Exploring the Political Economic and Cultural Dimensions. Ed. J. S. Grewal and Hugh Johnston. New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994. 380-391. “The novels selected for discussion are Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1973) and Anita Desai’s Where Shall We Go This Summer (1975).”

  1377. LAMB, Martha Moss. “Margaret Atwood’s ‘Trick Hip’: Transcending Duality with Imagination.” MA thesis.
Florida Atlantic University, 1994. 73 pp.

  1378. LAURENT, Delphine. “La créativité féminine dans l’oeuvre de Margaret Atwood: Surfacing, Lady Oracle, Cat’s Eye.” MLM [Maîtrise de letters modernes] thesis, Université de Bourgogne, 1994. 123 pp.

  1379. LAURET, Maria. Liberating Literature: Feminist Fiction in America. London; New York: Routledge, 1994. See especially section in chapter, “Backlash Fictions of the 1980s,” 176-183, on The Handmaid’s Tale which suggests a “hostility to feminism” in this novel.

  1380. LEDYARD, M. D. “Metaphoric Landscape in the Novels of Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood.” MPhil thesis. St. Andrews, 1994.

  1381. LITTLE, Judy. “Humoring the Sentence: Women’s Dialogic Comedy.” American Women Humorists: Critical Essays. Ed. Linda A. Morris. New York; London: Garland Publishing, 1994. 155-170. Brief mention of Atwood’s poem, “The Landlady,” as an example of women’s comic style.

  1382. LOMBARDI, Giancarlo. “Leggere ‘a rebours’: Strategie d’interpretazione storico-testuale in The Robber Bride.” Rivista di studi canadesi 7 (1994): 105-116.

  1383. LONG, Michael. “Theory into Practice: Establishing the Postmodernity of At-wood’s ‘Loulou; or, The Domestic Life of the Language.’” Postscript: A Journal of Graduate School Criticism and Theory 1.2 (1994): 61-70.

  1384. LUTWACK, Leonard. Birds in Literature. Gainesville; Tallahassee; Tampa; Boca Raton; Pensacola; Orlando; Miami; Jacksonville: UP of Florida, 1994. See Chapter 5, “Literature and the Future of Birds,” 231-254, and especially 234-236 which discusses Atwood’s descriptions of people’s attitude to the wild in Surfacing and Bluebeard’s Egg.

  1385. MARINOVICH, Sarolta. “The Discourse of the Other: Female Gothic in Contemporary Women’s Writing.” Neohelicon 21.1 (1994): 189-205. Atwood’s “Giving Birth” is examined along with works by Flannery O’Connor and Doris Lessing.

  1386. MARRA, Giulio. “Surfacing: A Journey to Innocence.” Rivista di studi canadesi 7 (1994): 45-52.

  1387. MARTINEZ-ZALCE, Graciela. “Margaret Atwood and Octavio Paz: Convergence and Divergence.” Voices of Mexico 28 (July-September 1994): 42-44. Survival and Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude are used as examples of essays that are central to understanding the cultural identity of Canada and Mexico.

  1388. MASCARO, Patricia Ellen. “Word and Flesh: Gender Utopias and Dystopias in Three Canadian Science Fiction Novels.” MA thesis. University of Windsor, 1994. 163 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1995). “Many Canadian authors are turning to speculative fiction genres, instead of more realistic genres, to tell their tales. In the cases of William Gibson, Margaret At-wood, and Elisabeth Vonarburg, each author has used the speculative fiction genre of utopian science fiction to satirically depict restrictive gender roles that exist in contemporary Euro-American society.” (Author). For more see MAI 34.02 (April 1996): 532.

  1389. MATTHEWS, Patricia Shaw. “Pre-Revolt in 2100: A Handmaid’s Tale.” Niekas 44 (1994): 12-13.

  1390. McCOMBS, Judith. “From ‘Places, Migrations’ to The Circle Game: Atwood’s Canadian and Female Metamorphoses.” Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays. Ed. Colin Nicholson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 51-67. Traces these changes through examination of manuscript material.

  1391. MEINDL, Dieter. “Gender and Narrative Perspective in Margaret Atwood’s Stories.” Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays. Ed. Colin Nicholson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 219-229. Discusses the stories from Dancing Girls and Other Stories and Bluebeard’s Egg and concludes that the “short stories display a gender-based rather than a language-based conception of reality.”

  1392. MITCHELL, E. “Narration, Ideology and the Construction of the Female Subject in the Fiction of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.” MA thesis. Kent (England), 1994.

  1393. MOGFORD, Sheilagh A. “Taking Up Space: Power and Self-Discovery in Women’s Literature.” MA thesis. University of Northern Colorado, 1994. 97 pp. “In literary works dealing with marginalized groups or individuals, struggles to ‘fit’ within the larger society and culture are often set up against a backdrop of struggles with personal, physical, and emotional space. The question of space, or lack of it, is evident in many literary periods and genres, most significantly in works which illustrate struggle within a power structure.” (Author). Uses examples from The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle, and The Robber Bride. For more see MAI 33.02 (April 1995): 340.

  1394. MUZYCHKA, Martha Deborah. “Telling Tales about Ourselves: The Integration of Identity as a Narrative Strategy in Selected Examples of Women’s Writing.” MA thesis. Memorial University, 1994. 176 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1995). Includes study of “Cat’s Eye, in which Atwood invests her writing with an awareness of such contemporary issues as personal growth, self-awareness and the philosophy that the personal is political.” (Author). For more see MAI 33.06 (December 1995): 1670.

  1395. NICHOLSON, Colin. “Living on the Edges: Constructions of Post-Colonial Subjectivity in Atwood’s Early Poetry.” Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays. Ed. Colin Nicholson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 11-50. In the Canadian paradigm of Atwood’s poetry, the female is placed as the subject, and the meaning comes from this positioning.

  1396. NICHOLSON, Colin, ed. Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity: New Critical Essays. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. 261 pp. Also published in Great Britain by Macmillan. Essays appear here as individual entries.

  1397. NILSEN, Helge Normann. “Four Feminist Novels by Margaret Atwood.” American Studies in Scandinavia 26.2 (1994): 126-139. Cites The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Lady Oracle, and Bodily Harm as novels that present the theme that women are oppressed in Western society and have limited options to overcome this.

  1398. ______. “Sukzessive und simultane Aufspaltung der Erzählinstanz im Erzählwerk Margaret Atwoods.” Orbis Litterarum 49.4 (1994): 233-251. Narrative techniques, especially in the early and middle phases, are examined.

  1399. NISCHIK, Reingard M. “Sukzessive und simultane Aufspaltung der Erzählinstanz im Erzählwerk Margaret Atwoods.” Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Lit-erary Studies 49.4 (1994): 233-251.

  1400. NOVY, Marianne. Engaging with Shakespeare: Responses of George Eliot and Other Women Novelists. Athens; London: University of Georgia Press, 1994. passim. Images of Shakespeare appear in Life Before Man and Cat’s Eye; a note refers to “Gertrude Talks Back” as Gertrude is rewritten as a Shakespearean woman; Survival is also mentioned in terms of rewriting Shakespeare’s tragedies.

  1401. OSBORNE, Carol. “Constructing the Self through Memory: Cat’s Eye as a Novel of Female Development.” Frontiers 14.3 (1994): 95-112. The use of memory as a tool for contemporary novelists is explored in Cat’s Eye.

  1402. PALUMBO, Alice. “The Maple Curtain: New Writing on Margaret Atwood.” Paragraph: Canadian Fiction Review 16.3 (Winter-Spring 1994-95): 25-28. Review-essay on 4 new secondary works on Margaret Atwood.

  1403. ______. “Writing Moral Stories: Genre and Gothic in Lynn Crosbie.” Open Letter 8.9 (Summer 1994): 86-96. Cites Lady Oracle; also describes Atwood as a Gothic poet.

  1404. PARKER, Peter, ed. The Reader’s Companion to the Twentieth-Century Novel. London: Fourth Estate and Helicon, 1994. Profiles two novels, The Edible Woman (442-443) and The Handmaid’s Tale (592-593).

  1405. PEARCE, Lynne. Reading Dialogics. London; New York; Melbourne; Auckland: Edward Arnold, 1994. passim. Two references to The Handmaid’s Tale.

  1406. PEARLMAN, Mickey. What to Read: The Essential Guide for Reading Group Members and Other Book Lovers. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994. 34, 164. Brief synopsis of The Robber Bride and The Handmaid’s Tale.

  1407. PIRÉ, Luciana. “Parole e meraviglia: La poesia di Margaret Atwood.” Rivista di studi canadesi 7 (1994): 53-64.

  1408. POLLVOGT, Lieselotte. “Another Mode of Meaning: Navigating Discourse in Novels by Margaret Atwoo
d, Marge Piercy, and Thomas Pynchon.” MA thesis. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1994. 58 pp.

  1409. PONTUALE, Francesco. “Survival, ovvero: Ma la letteratura canadese è davvero cosí catastrofica?” Rivista di studi canadesi 7 (1994): 35-44.

  1410. PORTELLI, Alessandro. The Text and the Voice: Writing, Speaking, and Democracy in American Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. passim. Brief mentions of Cat’s Eye and The Handmaid’s Tale.

  1411. PORTER-LADOUSSE, Gillian. “The Retreating Sign: The Obsolescent Bridge in Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye.” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 17.1 (Autumn 1994): 51-57. Analysis of the symbolism of the bridge in this novel.

  1412. POTTER, Nick. “Tropics of Identity in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing.” Swansea Review (1994): 462-469.

  1413. PRABHAKAR, M. “Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman: Guide to Feminism.” New Quest 105 (1994): 149-154.

  1414. PRINGLE, Mary M. “‘The Desire of the Woman Which Is for the Desire of the Man’: Feminist Readings in Austen and Atwood.” PhD thesis. University of North Dakota, 1994. 134 pp. “Three novels by Jane Austen are compared to three novels by Margaret Atwood in the context of reading and writing as feminist activity. Anna G. Jonasdottir’s theoretical discussion of male authority supported by women’s alienated love elaborates the apparent truth of W. B. Yeats’s observation that ‘the desire of the woman...is for the desire of the man,’ the thematic link between the three essays which focus on women’s concerns regarding work, maternity, and professionalism. Austen and Atwood are presented as early and late forms of a bright, coherent, middle-class female subjectivity that has remained remarkably coherent over two centuries and two continents. Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Atwood’s Lady Oracle are compared as two metagothics….In the comparison between Mansfield Park and The Edible Woman, the significance of women’s potential, symbolic, and actual maternal functions is discussed in the context of woman as commodity. Persuasion and Life Before Man are compared as sites for the presentation of professionalism as an ascendant ideology allowing for both the advancement and control of the middle class.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 55.12 (June 1995): 3854.