Margaret Atwood (Palgrave Modern Novelists) - Softcover

Margaret Atwood's appeal to a wide international readership is grounded in her versatility as a writer. Through a dazzling variety of generic forms - Gothic romance, science fiction dystopias, fictive autobiographies and historical novels - she revises the conventions of fiction.

This approachable introduction, by one of Britain's leading Atwood critics, offers detailed analyses of Atwood's novels from the end of the 1960s to the present. With reference to the author's poetry and critical writings, Coral Ann Howells draws out Atwood's key recurring themes of Canadian identity and the wilderness, the representation of women and female bodies, and history and its narration. Howells also explores Atwood's distinctive brand of postmodernism with its ironic mixture of artifice and moral engagement.

The second edition of this insightful text has been thoroughly revised and updated and now includes new chapters covering Atwood's recent novels Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Oryx and Crake, and refers extensively to her 2002 collection of critical essays, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Winner of the Margaret Atwood Society Best Book in 1997, this is the essential guide to one of the world's most successful contemporary authors.

Coral Ann Howells is Professor of Canadian Literature at Reading University and a former chair of the Margaret Atwood Society.