Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Karen Macfarlane (Mount Saint Vincent University)

Ed. by Wendy Roy, University of Saskatchewan
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 1985

Places

Canada (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Gothic & Ghosts
Metafiction
Novel
Utopian / Dystopian

Resources

One of Margaret Atwood’s best known and most studied novels, The Handmaid's Tale is set in a dystopian near future, after the United States has been taken over by a group of fundamentalist Christian extremists. The government has been replaced by a theocracy and renamed “The Republic of Gilead” after “the mountain where Jacob promised to his father-in-law Laban that he would protect his two daughters” (Atwood, “Writing Utopia” rpt. Moving Targets Anansi Press 2004, 110). Atwood’s Gilead is a complex amalgam and distortion of late-twentieth century culture: the “moral majority” movement of the 1980s, declining birth rates, …

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3901 words

Citation: Macfarlane, Karen. "The Handmaid's Tale". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 December 2006 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=656, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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