Margaret Atwood's Aesthetics

The Artpolitical
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-58549-9
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 212 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 454 g

Perhaps more timely than ever, Margaret Atwood’s Aesthetics offers novel perspectives on both contemporary and canonical topics in Margaret Atwood’s work with a special focus on the intersections of literature and politics. Arguably one of the most political writers of our times, Atwood’s oeuvre subtly and overtly entangles readers in the dialectics of personal and political power asymmetries intrinsic to her aesthetic practices. The collection takes its cue from the concept of the ‘artpolitical’ as coined by Crispin Sartwell, whose afterword addresses Atwood’s aesthetic and imaginative material world-construction and explores the interrelationship between literatures and aesthetic as well as political systems in Atwood’s works. Individual chapters of Margaret Atwood’s Aesthetics contribute to increasingly burning questions concerning the relevance of literature today by drawing on a variety of critical perspectives, including Anthropocene studies, gender, intersectionality, the nonhuman and the posthuman, Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, risk studies, nationhood, intermediality, and teaching. Chapters offer fresh views on some of Atwood’s most prominent works, such as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments and their transmedial adaptations, while other chapters focus on Atwood’s latest publications as well as on under-researched works, including her graphic novels and her web-serialized publications. Margaret Atwood’s Aesthetics provides unique insights into the aesthetic and political power of Atwood’s oeuvre, arguing that literary and media representations and cultural adaptation practices contain a significant transformative potential that reaches beyond the page.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mohr, Dunja M

Sandrock, Kirsten

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements

Margaret Atwood’s Aesthetics: The Artpolitical: An Introduction

DUNJA M. MOHR AND KIRSTEN SANDROCK

1 Margaret Atwood, Writing in the “Carnivalesque” Spirit, against Oppression

THEODORE F. SHECKELS

2 The Human and the Posthuman: Precarious Lives in Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last

SHRADDHA A. SINGH

3 Atwood’s Graphic Novels: (Aesthetic) Form and (Political) Function of the Angel Catbird Trilogy and the War Bears Series

BRIGITTE JOHANNA GLASER

4 Adaptation as “Artpolitical” Remediation: From The Handmaid’s Tale to The Testaments and Back

ANNIKA MCPHERSON

5 “We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print”: Storytelling and the Politics of In/Visibility

ALESSANDRA BOLLER

6 In_Visibilizing the Gendered History of Slavery: Fertility, Oppression, and the (Black) Female Body in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale

SYLVIA MIESZKOWSKI

7 Resilience and Environmental Futurity in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

SYLVIA MAYER

8 Which Oryx? A Reading of Intersectionality, Race, and Class Politics through the Narrative Male Gaze

KATHERINE PARSONS

9 Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace: The Politics and Aesthetics of Writing the Nation

ANCA-RALUCA RADU

10 “To see clearly and without flinching”: Teaching the Works of Margaret Atwood

LAUREN RULE MAXWELL

11 Afterword: Margaret Atwood’s Distribution of the Sensible

CRISPIN SARTWELL

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Dunja M. Mohr, University of Erfurt, Germany, is Vice President of the Margaret Atwood Society and the Society’s European Representative. She acts as Head of the Women, Gender, and Diversity Studies Section of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-Speaking Countries and serves on the Advisory Boards of Utopian Studies and Margaret Atwood Studies. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Worlds Apart? Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias and has co-edited several volumes, among them Embracing the Other: Addressing Xenophobia in the New Literatures in English, "9/11 as Catalyst - American and Cultural Responses" (special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (with Sylvia Mayer)), and Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity (with Birgit Däwes).

Kirsten Sandrock holds the Chair of English Literature and Cultural Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany. She is the author of Scottish Colonial Literature: Writing the Atlantic, 1603–1707 (2021) and Gender and Region: Maritime Fiction in English by Canadian Women, 1976–2005 (2009) as well as of numerous articles on Shakespeare and early modern literature, gender studies, Canadian literature, travel writing, Scottish studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies. In 2005, she received the Government of Canada Award. She is currently Vice President of the German Shakespeare Association and co-edited, with Lukas Lammers, the Shakespeare Seminar Online from 2016 to 2023.