This chapter explores the variety of genres within which Atwood has chosen to write about history, interweaving historical fact with imaginative rewriting and reinventing, with reference to her poems in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, her nonfiction essay “In Search of Alias Grace,” and her novels. The focus is on Atwood’s narrative art, with detailed analyses of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin. These novels with their splicing together of different genres (historical documentary, fictive autobiography, crime fiction, dystopias, Gothic) illustrate the multiple scripts and alternative perspectives through which history may be told, in Atwood’s reappraisal of Canada’s national history and heritage myths, as she reinterprets Canadian themes through her contemporary social, ethical, and global concerns.

This chapter focuses on Atwood as a Canadian writer and the evolution of her global persona as an international literary celebrity, major thinker, and public spokesperson on global issues of environmentalism and ethical questions related to biotechnology and human rights. Illustrated by its generous inclusion of quotations from Atwood herself, the chapter traces her career development in three stages: “Mapping Her Canada” concentrates on when Atwood addresses fellow Canadians with her early poetry collections, notably Survival and Surfacing; “Interpreting Canada Abroad” reads Canadian themes through an increasingly internationalist lens, featuring The Handmaid’s Tale, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, three short story collections, Kanadian Kultcher Komics, and children’s stories; “Canada in the World” moves between Toronto in her three 1990s historical novels to her postapocalyptic dystopia, the MaddAddam trilogy, returning to Canada with Stone Mattress and Hag-Seed, then back to the United States with The Testaments.

This chapter, which considers selected Atwood texts over fifty years, focuses on sexual politics in her representations of women’s attempts to define and reclaim possession of their own bodies and identities. Within a framework that includes feminist theorists Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Joan Riviere, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Bordo, and Wendy Harcourt, the chapter considers the psychological and sociopolitical implications of body denigration. Signaling Atwood’s enduring motif of the disappearing female body without free will, from the early “mud poem” (1974), the chapter explores varieties of women’s self-obliteration and bodily reclamation in The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle, Gilead’s patriarchal domination over female bodies in The Handmaid’s Tale, women’s often ineffectual resistance to bodily objectification in Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin, and disturbing futuristic speculations on the possibility of complete possession of female bodies in Oryx and Crake and The Heart Goes Last through biotechnology and robotics.

Presents Margaret Atwood as a Canadian and international literary superstar, introducing students and general readers to the many different and evolving facets of Atwood’s work across all genres, up to and including The Testaments. This revised edition is both a revisiting of Atwood’s earlier work and a charting of new directions since 2000, with emphasis on her increasing engagement with popular genres, especially dystopias and graphic novels, and her influential online presence. The focus is on Atwood’s topicality, with The Handmaid’s Tale and its recent television adaptations now center stage. Atwood engages with a new generation in response to profound changes in reading practices and changing conditions in publishing and marketing. Atwood’s often controversial feminism and her urgent environmental concerns with survival are treated in the brief overview of her work and Atwoodian criticism since 2000, including discussion of the Atwood archives at the University of Toronto.

The central focus of this chapter is on variations in Atwood’s perennial theme of sexual power politics, with extensive analysis of early poems in The Circle Game, Power Politics, and Bodily Harm, developing into an extended exploration of the interface between power politics in the personal and public worlds in The Handmaid’s Tale with its current sociopolitical relevance for women’s rights and human rights. This chapter concludes with an interpretation of The Heart Goes Last, reading it through Ahmed’s theory of affectivity, eliding personal and wider political resonances.

This chapter analyzes the recent popular television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, showing how serial storytelling has extended the social and political discussions begun by the novel. Specific attention is paid to the political implications of soundtrack and visual aesthetics, including the series’ allusions to painting, photography, and cinema, as well as costume, lighting, and choreography. The technique of alternating mass scenes, as in the Prayvaganza and the Particicution, overhead shots, and shallow focus close-up is considered. The visual impact of the Handmaids’ costumes extends to their widespread use in contemporary human rights demonstrations. Finally, the chapter reviews viewers’ responses both positive and negative, including concerns about the problematic “color-blindness” of the series. The debate around the series exposes the interdependence of aesthetic, intellectual, and moral categories that reflect a range of sociocultural preoccupations.

This chapter offers a comprehensive analysis of Atwood’s ongoing environmental concerns over five decades and her increasingly urgent warnings, referencing her fiction, nonfictional prose, and recent interviews. Framed by extensive discussions of contemporary writings on the deep ecology and radical environmentalism that have influenced Atwood’s thinking, the chapter includes brief critical analyses of Surfacing, Life Before Man, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Payback, with its main focus on the MaddAddam trilogy. In an extended analysis of Atwood’s speculative fiction across the three volumes, Bouson addresses multiple topics relating to environmentalism and bioengineering: “The Perils of the Anthropocene Age: Humanity’s Ecocidal Exploitation of Nature,” “Green Religion and Green Anarchism,” “Crake as Eco-terrorist and Radical Environmentalist,” which features a critical discussion of his Crakers, and “Deep Ecology and Ecospiritualism.” The chapter argues that Atwood leaves the question of future human survival open to speculation.

This is not a work of fiction, although I wish it were. Some of the cases described here could recall the imagery evoked by Mary Shelly, author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, who tells a horror story about a young rogue scientist who creates an unsightly monster through clandestine, aberrant experimentation. Although Frankenstein is the name of the monster’s creator, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, readers would be forgiven for debating who the real monster happens to be. In Policing the Womb, the story of Marlise Muñoz comes to mind. Brain-dead, decomposing in a Texas hospital, forced by state legislation to gestate a barely developing fetus while her body decays and the anomalies in the fetus mount. Eventually, it will be reported that the fetus is hydrocephalic, which means severe brain damage in this case and water or fluid developing on its brain. Medical reports will also show that the fetus is not developing its lower extremities. The state knows brain death is irreversible.