Margaret Atwood's Aesthetics

The Artpolitical

Dunja M. Mohr, Kirsten Sandrock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040308059
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Margaret Atwood’s Aesthetics: The Artpolitical: An Introduction
• 1 Margaret Atwood, Writing in the “Carnivalesque” Spirit, against Oppression
• 2 The Human and the Posthuman: Precarious Lives in Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last
• 3 Atwood’s Graphic Novels: (Aesthetic) Form and (Political) Function of the Angel Catbird Trilogy and the War Bears Series
• 4 Adaptation as “Artpolitical” Remediation: From The Handmaid’s Tale to The Testaments and Back
• 5 “We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print”: Storytelling and the Politics of In/Visibility
• 6 In_Visibilizing the Gendered History of Slavery: Fertility, Oppression, and the (Black) Female Body in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale
• 7 Resilience and Environmental Futurity in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
• 8 Which Oryx? A Reading of Intersectionality, Race, and Class Politics through the Narrative Male Gaze
• 9 Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace: The Politics and Aesthetics of Writing the Nation
• 10 “To see clearly and without flinching”: Teaching the Works of Margaret Atwood
• 11 Afterword: Margaret Atwood’s Distribution of the Sensible
• Index