Atwood, Margaret
Atwood, Margaret (1939– ),Canadian author whose works evoke and revise fairy tales. Born in Ottawa, strongly influenced by scientific and visual‐arts traditions in her family, and active in freedom of speech and other political organizations, Atwood has been acclaimed critically and has to date published nine novels, five collections of short stories, 14 books of poems, and several volumes of non‐fiction. Harold Pinter wrote the screenplay for the 1990 film adaptation of Atwood's dystopia The Handmaid's Tale.
Atwood positions herself as a Canadian and feminist writer. In Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), where she foregrounds the ‘Rapunzel syndrome’ imprisoning many heroines of Canadian novels, she argues that Canada is an ‘unknown territory’ for its people because of its colonial history, and that its writers can provide a creative map, ‘a geography of...
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