Margaret Atwood

‘This diverse collection, edited by Gina Wisker, offers a range of fresh perspectives on Margaret Atwood, one of today’s most important authors. Spanning feminism, ecology, posthumanism, storytelling and more, it provides new analysis into her work from her early novels to recent poetry, revealing Atwood’s enduring power to challenge, inspire, and reimagine identity and survival. It is essential reading for Atwood scholars and students alike.’ – Dr Claire O’Callaghan, Loughborough University
‘This companion to Atwood’s writing is an impressively wide-ranging and theoretically ambitious addition to Atwood scholarship. It engages with key texts in her oeuvre while also discussing her libretti, poetry, short stories and children’s books from a variety of critical perspectives: including biotechnologies, eco-cultural, dystopian and post-humanist approaches. In attending so fully to the ethical imperatives animating Atwood’s work, the collection also provides a fascinating genealogy of feminist engagements over the past several decades.’ – Dr Denise deCaires Narain, Emeritus Reader, University of Sussex
‘A comprehensive, intellectually provocative and accessible collection. Wisker’s helpful introduction thoughtfully addresses the evolution of Atwood’s work as both literature and social commentary. The essays cover everything from music, fairy tales and feminism in Atwood’s work and reveal her as a groundbreaking writer across genres and modes. Thorough and engaging scholarship.’ – Dr Regina Hansen, Boston University
For several decades Margaret Atwood has been a consistent, insightful, wry, concerned and utterly engaged voice for our varying times. Margaret Atwood: A New Companion offers new interpretations of a wide range of Atwood’s writing, including lesser discussed works like her children’s books, poetry and music. The book addresses crucial contemporary political and cultural issues, including climate change, sustainability, eco-diversity, Covid-19, Trump’s policies, surveillance, identity, gender and power. The collection shares new insights into the ever topical Alias Grace, The Handmaid’s Tale and the legacies in The Testaments. It explores and enacts themes of mourning and loss and an exuberant engagement with life in her poetry as well as her activist writing on eco-diversity and survival.
The book affirms Margaret Atwood as a fount of powerful, insightful and practical knowledge about the importance of language and story in action and of carefully and deliberately choosing, speaking and sharing insights, arguments and alternative ways of imagining. A skilled weaver of words, Atwood enacts the magic of writing, speaking truth to power.