Margaret Atwood: The Shape-Shifter - Hardcover

Cevaina, C.S.; Howellis, C.A.

9788186318515: Margaret Atwood: The Shape-Shifter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 8186318518 ISBN 13: 9788186318515

Publisher: Creative Books / SAB Distributed, 1998

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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.

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From the Back Cover

Margaret Atwood's appeal to a wide international readership is grounded in her versatility as a writer. Through a dazzling variety of generic forms - Gothic romance, science fiction dystopias, fictive autobiographies and historical novels - she revises the conventions of fiction.

This approachable introduction, by one of Britain's leading Atwood critics, offers detailed analyses of Atwood's novels from the end of the 1960s to the present. With reference to the author's poetry and critical writings, Coral Ann Howells draws out Atwood's key recurring themes of Canadian identity and the wilderness, the representation of women and female bodies, and history and its narration. Howells also explores Atwood's distinctive brand of postmodernism with its ironic mixture of artifice and moral engagement.

The second edition of this insightful text has been thoroughly revised and updated and now includes new chapters covering Atwood's recent novels Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake, and refers extensively to her 2002 collection of critical essays, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Winner of the Margaret Atwood Society Best Book in 1997, this is the essential guide to one of the world's most successful contemporary authors.

About the Author

CORAL ANN HOWELLS is Professor of English and Canadian Literature at the University of Reading, UK, and a former President of the British Association for Canadian Studies. Her previous publications include Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction: Refiguring Identities (2003), which is also published by Palgrave Macmillan.

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