Strategies for identity : the fiction of Margaret Atwood

Abstract

This study is a critical reading of the fiction of contemporary Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood. My analysis focuses on problems pertaining to the questions of genre, identity and female subjectivity. The thesis is thematically structured. Chapter One, 'The Question of Genre: Creative Re- Appropriations, explores the plurality of genres and narrative styles present in the novels. The second Chapter' A Proliferation of Identities: Doubling and Intertextuality' examines constructions of the self in the light of psychoanalytic theories of language and subjectivity which conceive of the subject as heterogeneous and in constant process. Atwood's challenge to the notion of the homogeneous ego finds a gendered vision wherein woman assumes a multiplicity of roles and positions. Chapter Three 'Cognitive Questions' discusses the text's emphasis on sense receptivity and the epistemological question they pose in relation to language, reality and interpretation. Chapter Four 'Writing the Female Character' analyses Atwood's configurations of femininity, sexual politics and sexual difference