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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.
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The Cambridge 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 contributors consider recurrent topics, for what emerges through the multiplicity of Atwood’s voices, personas, and formal experiments are the continuities in her work across decades and across genres. 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. C o r a l A n n H ow e l l s is Professor of English and Canadian Literature at the University of Reading. Her books include Private and Fictional Words, Margaret Atwood (winner of the Margaret Atwood Society Best Book Award in 1997), Alice Munro, and Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction: Refiguring Identities. She is co-editor of Margaret Atwood: The Shape-Shifter and editor of Where are the Voices Coming From? Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History. She is former President of the British Association of Canadian Studies and has been associate editor of the International Journal of Canadian Studies. She has lectured extensively on Margaret Atwood and Canadian women’s fiction in the UK, Europe, Australia, Canada, USA, and India.
THE CAMBRIDGE C O M PA N I O N T O
M A R G A R E T AT W O O D EDITED BY
CORAL ANN HOWELLS
c a m b r i d g e u n i v e rs i t y p r e s s ˜ Paulo Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521548519 C Cambridge University Press 2006
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2006 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge co