Winner of The Margaret Atwood Society's 2003 “Best Book on Atwood’s Work” Award

Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations

Recent Poetry and Fiction

Edited by Sharon Rose Wilson

Table of Contents

“This book is indispensable reading for those interested in Atwood and women's studies, as well as Canadian and North American literature.” —Lee Thompson, University of Vermont

Margaret Atwood's Textual Assassinations is an edited collection of scholarly essays that concentrate on the recent work—poetry and fiction—of renowned Canadian author Margaret Atwood. The contributors concentrate on the postmodern and postcolonial techniques Atwood marshals in this body of work—the “textual assassinations” of the title—and also the writings in their Canadian cultural context. Atwood's recent poetry and short fiction, especially experimental pieces, have been largely ignored. This collection explores Atwood's new ways of presenting continuing themes, including survival. The issues of power and sexual politics that mark Atwood's earliest work have evolved. Beginning in the eighties and nineties and now in the twenty-first century, Atwood's characters and readers have become more aware of the multicultural, colonized, racist, and classist as well as patriarchal, sexist, and hypocritical nature of the worlds they occupy. Increasingly, Atwood's survivors are trickster creators, using their verbal “magic” to transform their worlds.

This new book contains new, never-published, groundbreaking essays on recent texts by many of the most well-known, Atwood and Canadian studies scholars, most of whom have written books on Margaret Atwood. Many of the essays consider the focus text in reference to all Atwood's work.

Sharon Rose Wilson is professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Northern Colorado.