Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Sharon Wilson (University of Northern Colorado)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.1.2: Canadian Writing and Culture (Anglophone): The Twentieth Century and beyond, 1900-present.
Vol. editors: Sarah Henzi (Simon Fraser University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Glen Nichols (Mount Allison University), Wendy Roy (University of Saskatchewan), Denis Salter (McGill University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 2000

Places

Canada (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel
Science Fiction

Resources

Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (2000), winner of the Booker Prize, is a Canadian postmodern metafiction that is deliberately deceptive. Structured like nesting Russian dolls, it is a novel-within-a novel within another novel, blending three narratives interspersed with newspaper clippings, a letter, and society announcements. The first narrative is a self-reflexive memoir of Iris Chase's life in Port Ticonderoga and Toronto, Canada, predominantly in the 19030s and 40s, including her writing of all three narratives. In the novel's present, Iris is 82 and living simultaneously in three time periods, the past of the two narratives's events, the present of the writing, and the future of the science fiction.

The …

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2066 words

Citation: Wilson, Sharon. "The Blind Assassin". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 March 2003 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1439, accessed 26 November 2024.]

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