Margaret Atwood

This is the first collection of essays published in the United Kingdom to focus upon a writer who already enjoys an international reputation. It is a part of Atwood's unique achievement that she manages to sustain her popularity with reading publics around the world as she brings feminist perspectives to bear upon personal and private experience and upon the public structures of power which shape individual lives. From a variety of theoretical perspectives, and including European and North American contributions, the essays gathered here explore how as a woman writer Atwood articulates the pressures and determinations which condition the feminine before allowing it to speak for itself, and how as a Canadian she explores the complicated relationships between representation and self-representation in a world of vastly uneven distributions of power and responsibility. A unique combination of feminist and postcolonial perspectives, it examines Atwood's poetry and short fiction as well as her novels.