The Companion to Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's international celebrity has given a new visibility to Canadian literature in English. This Companion provides a comprehensive critical account of Atwood's writing across the wide range of genres within which she has worked for the past forty years, while paying attention to her Canadian cultural context and the multiple dimensions of her celebrity. The main concern is with Atwood the writer, but there is also Atwood the media star and public performer, cultural critic, environmentalist and human rights spokeswoman, social and political satirist, and mythmaker. This immensely varied profile is addressed in a series of chapters which cover biographical, textual, and contextual issues. The Introduction contains an analysis of dominant trends in Atwood criticism since the 1970s, while the essays by twelve leading international Atwood critics represent the wide range of different perspectives in current Atwood scholarship.

Contents:

Margaret Atwood in her Canadian context / David Staines 
Biography/autobiography / Lorraine York 
Power politics : power and identity / Pilar Somacarrera 
Margaret Atwood's female bodies / Madeleine Davies 
Margaret Atwood and environmentalism / Shannon Hengen 
Margaret Atwood and history / Coomi S. Vevaina 
Home and nation in Margaret Atwood's later fiction / Eleonora Rao
Margaret Atwood's humor / Marta Dvorak 
Margaret Atwood's poetry and poetics / Branko Gorjup 
Margaret Atwood's short stories and shorter fictions / Reingard M. Nischik
Margaret Atwood's dystopian visions : The handmaid's tale and Oryx and Crake / Coral Ann Howells 
Blindness and survival in Margaret Atwood's major novels / Sharon R. Wilson.