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Earl G. Ingersoll (essay date October 1991)

SOURCE: "Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye: Re-Viewing Women in a Postmodern World," in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 22, No. 4, October, 1991, pp. 17-27.

[In the following essay, Ingersoll analyzes what he perceives as the autobiographical elements in Cat's Eye.]

Although one finds evidence of postmodernism in the manipulation of popular forms such as the Gothic in Lady Oracle and science fiction in The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye is Margaret Atwood's first full-fledged "postmodern" work. Always the wily evader of critics' pigeonholes, Atwood, in a recent interview, has denied the classification of her work as "postmodern." She expresses her own amused disdain towards the critical-academic world for its attraction to "isms" in the discourse of Cat's Eye when Elaine Risley visits the gallery where her retrospective show is to be mounted. Risley...

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1. Introduction
2. Criticism
   1. Barbara Hill Rigney (essay date 1978)
   2. Carol P. Christ (essay date 1980)
   3. Estella Lauter (essay date 1984)
   4. John Lanchester (review date 23 July 1987)
   5. Dave Smith (review date Summer 1988)
   6. Helen Yglesias (review date July 1989)
   7. J. Brooks Bouson (essay date 1989)
   8. Margaret Atwood with Earl G. Ingersoll (interview date Spring-Summer 1990)
   9. David Lucking (essay date 1990)
   10. Earl G. Ingersoll (essay date October 1991)
   11. Marilyn Patton (essay date October 1991)
   12. James Wilcox (review date 24 November 1991)
   13. Merle Rubin (review date 27 December 1991)
   14. Jill LeBihan (essay date 1991)
   15. Peter Kemp (review date 6 November 1992)
   16. Nathalie Cooke (essay date 1992)
   17. Laura Shapiro (review date 8 November 1993)
   18. Margaret Atwood with Lauri Miller (interview date February-March 1994)
3. Further Reading
4. Copyright

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