Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction

This is a collection of original essays by well-known Atwood scholars offering contemporary critical readings and assessments of three well known Atwood texts. In this critical collection, well-known Atwood scholars offer original readings and critical re-evaluations of three Atwood masterpieces - "The Robber Bride", "The Blind Assassin", and "Oryx and Crake". Providing new critical assessments of Atwood's novels in language that is both lively and accessible, Margaret Atwood reveals not only Atwood's ongoing and evolving engagement with the issues that have long preoccupied her - ranging from the power politics of human relationships to a concern with human rights and the global environment - but also her increasing formal complexity as a novelist. If Atwood is a novelist who is part trickster, illusionist and con-artist, as she has often described herself, she is also, as the essays in this critical collection show, an author-ethicist with a finely honed sense of moral responsibility. This series offers up-to-date guides to the recent work of major contemporary North American authors. Written by leading scholars in the field, each book presents a range of original interpretations of three key texts published since 1990, showing how the same novel may be interpreted in a number of different ways. These informative, accessible volumes will appeal to advance undergraduate and postgraduate students, facilitating discussion and supporting close analysis of the most important contemporary American and Canadian fiction.