Margaret Atwood

Women in roles other than heroes have been consistently depicted throughout literary history. By examining typical female roles in Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony and Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, it becomes apparent that the female characters in these novels are heroes in their own right. These roles, which I will refer to as the…

While reading the poem ‘This is a Photograph of Me’ by Margaret Atwood, it is shown that while growing up she was blurred, unimportant and she was never heard. The writer talks about a picture that was taken a long time ago. We don’t know many details about the picture, not even simple things such…

The portrayal of the physical form and individuality in three works, namely The Handmaid’s Tale, the Miller’s Tale, and Never Let Me Go. The Handmaid’s Tale, The Miller’s Tale, and Never Let Me Go all examine the significance of the human form, delving into physicality with great importance. These fiction works are interconnected, using the…

Despite the superficial differences in form, structure, and plot, Flannery O’Connor’s and Margaret Atwood’s respective short stories both examine the various ways of living a rich and fulfilling life. Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find” tells the story of a family on a trip to Florida. The grandmother, an irritable and manipulative…

Through the course of ‘The Handmaids Tale’, Margaret Atwood uses an unconventional and ostensibly unordered form of plot construction to present Offred’s tale and certain major themes effectively to the reader. The construction of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is strongly linked to the prime theme of time running through the novel, as well as other more…

A foreshadow on today’s society as seen through Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. In today’s society, the one thing most stressed about is one’s outer appearance. It doesn’t matter how smart one is or how talented you are, if you have beauty then you have the world. Margaret Atwood, author of Oryx and Crake, focuses her…

The word “ecocriticism” was likely first used in William Rueckert’s essay “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism” (1978) and was later accepted in critical vocabulary when Cheryll Glotfelty, at that time a graduate student at Cornell, revived the term at the meeting of the Western Literature Association in Coeur d’Alene in 1989. She recommended…

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood describes the story of Offred, a Handmaid, that is a woman ascribed a breeding function by society, and who is placed with a husband and wife higher up the social ladder who “need” a child. Through Offred’s eyes we explore the rigidity of the theocracy in which she lives,…

Introduction ”Rat Song” is a poem written by Margaret Atwood and is part of Selected Poems from 1976. What is interesting about the poem is that it is written from the point of view of a rat. And by looking through the eyes of a rat (which many people see as a primitive and inferior…

Often times when one reads a piece of literary work, the way that its’ themes and storyline are interpreted is truly dependant upon the reader’s individual beliefs and morals. The same passage from a novel or poem can be seen in completely opposite perspectives from two different readers, despite the fact that they contain the…