Margaret Atwood

by Shannon Hengen

  1824. BENNETT, Donna, and Nathalie COOKE. “A Feminist by Another Name: At-wood and the Canadian Canon.” Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 33-43.

  1825. BENSON, Stephen. “Stories of Love and Death: Reading and Writing the Fairy Tale Romance.” Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Sarah Sceats and Gail Cunningham. London: Longman, 1996. 103-113. The quest and intertextuality are topics used in a comparative study of 4 novels: Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories and The Magic Toyshop, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

  1826. BENTON, Carol L. “Reading as Rehearsal in a Communication Class: Comic Voicings in Atwood’s Poetry.” Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 84-89.

  1827. BERAN, Carol L. “The End of the World and Other Things: Life Before Man and The Handmaid’s Tale.” Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hen-gen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 128-134.

  1828. BIESE, Eivor. “In Search of Voice in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing.” New Cou-rant 6 (1996): 26-38.

  1829. BJERRING, Nancy. “Feminism as Framework for Investigating Canadian Multi-culturalism.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 29.3 (1996): 165-173.

  1830. BOOKER, M. Keith. A Practical Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism. White Plains, NY: Longman, 1996. See especially Chapter 14, “Approaches to The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood,” 257-283. The work seen through the prism of various critical perspectives: The New Criticism, Deconstructive Criticism, Bakhtinian Criticism, and Foucauldian Criticism. Chapter 19 also contains two critical essays on Atwood, one by Stephanie Barbé Hammer and the other by Amin Malak, separately indexed.

  1831. BOUSON, J. Brooks. “A Feminist and Psychoanalytic Approach in a Women’s College.” Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 122-127.

  1832. BRYDON, Diana. “Beyond Violent Dualities: Atwood in Postcolonial Contexts.” Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 49-54.

  1834. CECIL, Lynn Anne. “Working from Nineteenth-Century Discourses: Margaret Atwood’s Construction of Women in The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle, and The Robber Bride. MA thesis. University of Western Ontario, 1996. 89 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1996). “Rather than ignoring mythology that centers on women, Atwood has instead attempted to ‘transform it, rearrange it and shift the values’ (in Van Varsveld 67) in order to create female characters who are multidimensional and difficult to categorize into one specific construction….Particularly in The Edible Woman (1969), Lady Oracle (1976), and The Robber Bride (1993), Atwood creates female characters around the discursive figures of the angel in the house, the maiden in the tower, the femme fatale, the mermaid, and the triple goddess, while transforming the values and meanings associated with such figures. Atwood subverts Victorian conceptions of womanhood and parodies twentieth-century men and women who continue to condone categorizing women according to such types.” (Author). For more see MAI 34.06 (December 1996): 2168.

  1835. CHAPMAN, Suzette. “Alternative Identities: Sexual Redefinition of Women in The Last of the Mohicans, Jane Eyre, Democracy, and The Handmaid’s Tale.” MA thesis. University of Houston–Clear Lake, 1996. 160 pp. “In four important novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-American literature, subversive female protagonists address issues of social power and redefine literary heroism. The acquisition and concession of power can be traced through marginalized women in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Joan Didion’s Democracy (1984), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)….The[se women] counter gender discrimination, which is socialized biology, through sexuality, which is socialized sexual behavior. Sexual difference, the source of their victimization, becomes a solution….They apply a creative twist to Darwinian dominance and submission by overcoming culturally imposed limits based on biology and by proposing and enacting alternative sex-ualities.” (Author). For more see MAI 35.03 (June 1997): 651.

  1836. COOKE, John. The Influence of Painting on Five Canadian Writers: Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Timothy Findley, Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996.

  1837. COWAN, Amy. “Transformations: Writing On / The Lesbian (Body).” Canadian Woman Studies 16.2 (Spring 1995): 53-57. “Within contemporary feminist texts, the body is a recurrent and often central text. This article examines two texts, one heterosexual, Margaret Atwood’s ‘Loulou, Or the Domestic Life of Language,’’ and one lesbian, Rebecca Brown’s ‘Isle of Skye,’ to analyze the way the relationship between the female body and language is configured.” (Journal).

  1838. D’ARCY, Chantal Cornut-Gentille, and José Ángel García LANDA, eds. Gender I-deology: Essays on Theory, Fiction and Film. Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996. Contains numerous references to The Handmaid’s Tale. See especially FLORÉN, Celia, below.

  1839. DAVIDSON, Arnold E. “Negotiating Wilderness Tips”: Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 180-186.

  1840. DJWA, Sandra. “Canada.” The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Canadian Writing. Ed. John Sturrock. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1996. 66-82. Atwood discussion: 72-74.

  1841. EVANS, Gillian M. “Context Is All: Creativity, Criticism, and the Narrative Voice in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.” MPhil thesis. University of Oxford, 1996.

  1842. FARRELL, Kirby. “Thinking Through Others: Prosthetic Fantasy and the Cultural Moment.” Massachusetts Review (Summer 1996): 213-235.

  1843. FLORÉN, Celia. “A Reading of Margaret Atwood’s Dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale.” Gender, I-deology: Essays on Theory, Fiction and Film. Ed. Chantal Cor-nut-Gentille D’Arcy and José Ángel García Landa. Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Ro-dopi, 1996. 253-264.

  1844. FRIEDMAN, Thomas B. “Using Atwood’s Survival in an Interdisciplinary Canadian Studies Course.” Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hen-gen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 63-69.

  1845. FRIEDMAN, Thomas B., and Shannon HENGEN. “Materials.” Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 7-20.

  1846. FRANZKE, Anne Disney. “Through the Heart of the Shadow: A Study of the Literary Works of Margaret Atwood.” MA thesis. Sonoma State University, 1996. 78 pp.

  1847. GORJUP, Branko. “New Arrivals, Further Departures: The Euro-Immigrant Experience in Canada.” Ethnic Literature and Culture in the U.S.A., Canada and Australia. Ed. Igor Maver. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996. 263-271. Includes discussion of Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie.

  1848. HAMMER, Stephanie Barbé. “The World as It Will Be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The Handmaid’s Tale.” A Practical Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism. M. Keith Booker. White Plains, NY: Longman, 1996. 409-419. Reprinted from Modern Language Studies 20.2 (Spring 1990): 39-49.

  1849. HARTING, Heike. “The Profusion of Meanings and the Female Experience of Colonization: Inscriptions of the Body as Site of Difference in Tsitsi Dangarem-bga’s Nervous Conditions and Margaret Atwood’s The Edibl
e Woman.” Fusion of Cultures. Ed. Peter O. Stummer and Christopher Balme. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 237-246. (ASNEL Papers, 2. Cross/Cultures, 26).

  1850. HELLER, Arno. “Margaret Atwood’s Ecological Vision.” Nationalism vs. Internationalism: (Inter)National Dimensions of Literatures in English. Ed. Wolfgang Zach and Ken L. Goodwin. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1996. 313-318. Especially in Surfacing.

  1851. HEWITT, Pamela. “Understanding Contemporary American Culture through The Handmaid’s Tale: A Sociology Class.” Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 109-113.

  1852. HOPE, Joan. “The Feminist Gaze: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Women’s Bodies.” PhD thesis. Indiana University, 1996. 241 pp. “This study examines the dialogue between feminism and postmodernism, primarily as it takes place in artistic and fictional representations of the female body….Particularly effective methods are to evoke and then foil the male gaze by shaping and reshaping the female body that it watches and to condition the reception of the image with language. Many performers, artists, and writers in England, Canada, and the United States have experimented with these techniques. I discuss works by Madonna, Mary Kelly, Cindy Sherman, Margaret Atwood, and by science fiction writers Ursula K. Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas, Joanna Russ, and Marge Piercy.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 57.04 (October 1996): 1612.

  1853. HOWELLS, Coral Ann. “Disruptive Geographies; Or, Mapping the Region of Woman in Contemporary Canadian Women’s Writing in English.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31.1 (1996): 115-126. Article includes analysis of The Robber Bride.

  1854. HUFNAGEL, Jill. “Atwood’s ‘Variation on the Word Sleep.’” The Explicator 54.3 (Spring 1996): 188-191. On Atwood poem.

  1855. ______. “The Uneasy Marriage of Feminism and Postmodernism in Six Twentieth-Century Novels by Women.” PhD thesis. University of North Carolina, 1996. 224 pp. The study traces the feminist postmodern tradition through Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street (1984), Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day (1988), and Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992). For more see DAI-A 57.07 (January 1997): 3291.

  1856. INGERSOLL, Earl. “The Engendering of Narrative in Doris Lessing’s Shikasta and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Visions of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Fifteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ed. Allienne Becker. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. 39-47.

  1857. JACOBSEN, Sally A. “Themes of Identity in Atwood’s Poems and ‘Rape Fantasies’: Using The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.” Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 70-76.

  1858. JENNINGS, Rosalind Maria. “Disappearance in Deceptive Landscapes: Borderlines of Identity in the Canadian Wilderness with Particular Reference to Selected Works by Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje and Aritha Van Herk.” PhD thesis. University of York (UK), 1996. For more see Index to Theses Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland. 47 (1998): 257.

  1859. JOHNSON, Brian. “Language, Power, and Responsibility in The Handmaid’s Tale: Towards a Discourse of Literary Gossip.” Canadian Literature 148 (Spring 1996): 39-55. Focuses on the gossip in literature and ways in which the novel tests the power of gossip.

  1860. ______. “Schools of Scandal: Gossip in Theory and Canadian Fiction.” MA thesis. University of Manitoba, 1996. 205 pp. Also available on microfiche from Canadian Theses Service (1997). “Gossip in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale develops the feminist articulation of gossip as a politically subversive discourse, but also suggests the dangers of gossip in its ‘legitimized,’ institutional form in ways that are illuminated, respectively, by M. M. Bahktin and Jacques Derrida’s theories of language.” (Author). For more see MAI 35.05 (October 1997): 1153.

  1861. KADAR, Marlene. “The Journals of Susanna Moodie as Life Writing.” Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 146-152.

  1862. KEMP, Mark Alexander Riach. “Backyards and Border Patrols: North American Nationalisms, Literature and the Impact of Postcolonialism.” PhD thesis. University of Pittsburgh, 1996. 444 pp. “This dissertation argues that postcolonial cultural theory alters the way North America literary traditions are understood. For the last century, literary traditions have been constructed, studied, and taught predominantly to serve national agendas. A canon reflects ‘the nation’—by which is most often meant the State—as an imagined community and a coherent system of values, symbols, and traits….To interrogate the relations between postcolonial and national reading attitudes, I examine the major works of four writers from the United States and Canada. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville represent hypercanonized authors from the politically fraught and culturally rich antebellum period in the US. Although still in mid-career, Margaret Atwood and Michael On-daatje have earned canonical status in Canada. All four authors both challenge and celebrate the concept and ideal of nation; they can thus provide a basis for interrogation of the State they are assumed to be serving and representing.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 57.12 (June 1997): 5151.

  1863. KIRTZ, Mary K. “Teaching Literature through Film: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Surfacing and The Handmaid’s Tale.” Approaches to Teaching At-wood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 140-145.

  1864. KORMALI, Sema. “Feminist Science Fiction: The Alternative Worlds of Piercy, Elgin, and Atwood.” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 4 (1996): 69-77. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time compared to Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

  1865. KURTZ, Roman. “All the Polarities: A Golden Age Revisited.” Fusion of Cultures? Ed. Peter O. Stummer and Christopher Balme. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996. 119-128. Surfacing compared to Marie-Clare Blais’s Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (A Season in the Life of Emmanuel) and Roch Carrier’s La Guerre, Yes Sir!

  1866. LAPPAS, Catherine. “‘Gilded Cages’ and ‘Concave Mirrors’: Female Prisons in Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.” Feminism in Multi-Cultural Literature. Ed. Antonio Sobejano-Moran. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. [85]-101. References The Handmaid’s Tale.

  1867. LAZ, C. “Science Fiction and Introductory Sociology: The Handmaid in the Classroom.” Teaching Sociology 24.1 (January 1996): 54-63. Examines the pedagogical uses of science fiction in teaching sociology, with particular focus on The Handmaid’s Tale.

  1868. LECY, Maren. “Coloring in the Characters: A Study of the Symbolic and Meta-phoric Uses of Color by Margaret Atwood, Charles Baxter, Zora Neale Hurston, and John Edgar Wideman.” MALS thesis. Hamline University, 1996. 117 pp.

  1869. LEE, So-Hee. “A Study on the Women’s Work in The Handmaid’s Tale Focused on the Handmaid’s Work.” Feminist Studies in English Literature 3 (1996): 187-212. In Korean; abstract in English.

  1870. LEONARD, Garry. “A Practical Exercise: Popular Culture and Gender Construction in Surfacing and Bodily Harm.” Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 90-98.

  1871. LEVINE-KEATING, Helane. “Atwood’s You Are Happy: Power Politics, Gender Roles, and the Transformation of Myth.” Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Other Works. Ed. Sharon R. Wilson, Thomas B. Friedman, and Shannon Hengen. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996. 153-160.

  1872. LOMBARDI, Giancarlo. “Mi
rrors of Their Own: Feminist Diary Fiction, 1952-1994.” PhD thesis. Cornell University, 1996. 261 pp. “Constantly excluded from History, women have been forced to act as mere spectators to events which have nevertheless shaped their subjugated condition: the window thus remains their assigned place, and it is a window which often contains prison bars, if only at a symbolic level. The ideal coexistence of the internal and external world, that of the emotions and that of politics, lies at the core of most feminist fictional diaries, and my analysis of works by Alba de Cespedes, Dacia Maraini, Susanna Tamaro, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Simone de Beauvoir is aimed at exploring its multifaceted, yet constant presence. Such a task will be carried out through the analysis of significant textual passages which most clearly reveal a struggle, occurring on one hand within the psyche of the diarist herself, and on the other, between the woman diarist and the phallogocentric society that resists her access to the written word.” (Author). For more see DAI-A 57.04 (October 1996): 1607.

  1873. LOTT, Lisa. “The Female Quest: Journeys Toward Re-Naming Identity and ReClaiming Wholeness of Self in Novels by Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Joan Didion and Margaret Atwood.” MA thesis. University of Houston–Clear Lake, 1996. 60 pp. “Female protagonists in these novels represent different eras in history and share similar characteristics and problems. Each protagonist struggles to find her own identity, seeks to take control of her life, experiences feelings of isolation and ‘otherness,’ and becomes disillusioned with patriarchal female archetypes. Through quest, female characters push the established boundaries of ‘otherness’ and emerge re-defined, with a re-newed sense of self, and a re-claimed purpose.” (Author). For more see MAI 35.03 (June 1997): 652.