Margaret Atwood’s international celebrity has given a new visibility to Canadian literature in English. This Companion provides a comprehensive critical account of Atwood’s writing across the wide range of genres within which she has worked for the past forty years, while paying attention to her Canadian cultural context and the multiple dimensions of her celebrity. The main concern is with Atwood the writer, but there is also Atwood the media star and public performer, cultural critic, environmentalist and human rights spokeswoman, social and political satirist, and mythmaker. This immensely varied profile is addressed in a series of chapters which cover biographical, textual, and contextual issues. The Introduction contains an analysis of dominant trends in Atwood criticism since the 1970s, while the essays by twelve leading international Atwood critics represent the wide range of different perspectives in current Atwood scholarship.
Coral Ann Howells is Professor of English and Canadian Literature at the University of Reading. Her books include Private and Fictional Words, Margaret Atwood (winner of the Margaret Atwood Society Best Book Award in 1997), Alice Munro, and Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction: Refiguring Identities. She is co-editor of Margaret Atwood: The Shape-Shifter and editor of Where are the Voices Coming From? Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History. She is former President of the British Association of Canadian Studies and has been associate editor of the International Journal of Canadian Studies. She has lectured extensively on Margaret Atwood and Canadian women's fiction in the UK, Europe, Australia, Canada, USA, and India.
