Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Description

Margaret Atwood's popular dystopian novel A Handmaid's Tale, engages the reader with a broad range of issues relating to power, gender and religious politics. This guide provides an overview of the key critical debates and interpretations of the novel and encourages you to engage with key questions and readings in your reading of the text. It includes discussion of key themes and concepts including: - Representation of women's roles, gender, sexuality and power - Language, style and form - Dystopias and genre fictions - Power, control and religious fundamentalism. Combining helpful guidance on reading Atwood's text with overviews of significant stylistic and thematic issues and an introduction to criticism, this is an ideal companion to reading and studying A Handmaid's Tale.

Gina Wisker is the Head of Centre for Learning and Teaching at the University of Brighton, UK.

"Gina Wisker has created an admirably comprehensive, though attractively succinct, analysis of the key themes, and literary and political interests, of Atwood's acclaimed novel. Storytelling, different forms of narrative practice and the construction of history, are some of the many topics it treats that receive discussion in the Guide. Wisker perceptively investigates the 1980s context in which Atwood wrote the novel, while commenting knowledgeably on its socio-political importance to the present-day. She writes particularly powerfully about the feminist debates that it incorporates and examines Atwood's expose of the male control of women's bodies and her ambiguously complex description of female relationships. The representation of the characters who people the novel and the content of the individual chapters are both explored in a lively, accessible way. Wisker's decision to introduce questions for discussion is a particularly useful addition. All in all, the Guide provides an excellent commentary on Atwood's text." -- Paulina Palmer, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK