EL4030: Women & Narrative

Margaret Atwood's popular dystopian novel A Handmaid's Tale, engages the reader with a broad range of issues relating to power, gender and religious politics. This guide provides an overview of the key critical debates and interpretations of the novel and encourages you to engage with key questions and readings in your reading of the text. It includes discussion of key themes and concepts including: - Representation of women's roles, gender, sexuality and power - Language, style and form - Dystopias and genre fictions - Power, control and religious fundamentalism. Combining helpful guidance on reading Atwood's text with overviews of significant stylistic and thematic issues and an introduction to criticism, this is an ideal companion to reading and studying A Handmaid's Tale.

Margaret Atwood's Apocalypses features essays by established and new Atwood scholars on Atwood's poetry, The Handmaid's Tale, and the famous MaddAddam trilogy. Readers will encounter ways to trace the theme of apocalypse through decades of Atwood's work, and lenses which can be used to analyse fictional apocalypses, including disability studies, theology, and ecofeminism.

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale captivates readers with its disturbingly prescient vision of the future and haunting insights into the world as we know it. Religion--especially elements of the Christian faith--pervades every inch of the world as Atwood imagines it. Gilead's leaders use perverse forms of Christianity to sustain their authority and privilege, making understanding religion an integral part of understanding Gilead. In the face of the inextricable role of religion in the novel, readers are left to puzzle out religious references and allusions on their own. From the significance of names to twisted uses of religion to the origins of the Ceremony, this book answers all the questions you might have about religion in this prophetic novel. For anyone who's ever googled a biblical precedent or religious phrase after encountering Atwood's dystopia, this essential guide explains it all and gives readers a fascinating look into the novel and its world. Read it and understand The Handmaid's Tale like never before.

Zora Neale Hurston is considered one of the most controversial yet prominent figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance. This introductory study examines Hurston's contributions to that literary movement, as well as her role as mediator between the black and white worlds in which she lived. Readers will appeciate the clear presentation of the biographical facts of her life, as well as an overview of the issues and varying perceptions surrounding her literary achievements. A full chapter is devoted to analysing each of Hurston's major works of fiction: Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) as well as her short fiction and her fictionalized autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). For each of the works, plot, character development, themes, setting and symbols are identified and discussed in clear accessible language. An alternate critical perspective enhances the understanding of each of Hurston's full length works. Contemporary reviews are cited in a bibliography which also helps students find further biographical and critical information on Zora Neale Hurston.

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of The Handmaid's Tale tells you what you need to know--before or after you read Margaret Atwood's book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.    This short summary and analysis of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood includes:   Historical context Part-by-part summaries Analysis of the main characters Themes and symbols Important quotes Fascinating trivia Glossary of terms Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work   About Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale:   Margaret Atwood's dystopian literary masterpiece tells the story of Offred, a Handmaid living in the near future in what was once the United States. A new theocratic regime called the Republic of Gilead has come to power and changed life as she knew it.   Once Offred had a her own name and a loving family--a husband and daughter--both of which were taken from her; now she belongs to the Commander and his hostile wife, and her only value lies in her ability to bear a child for them. She used to read books and learn; now such things are forbidden to all women.   Gripping, disturbing, and so relevant today, The Handmaid's Tale is a brilliant novel and a chilling warning about what can happen when extreme ideas are taken to their logical conclusions.   The summary and analysis in this book are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of fiction.

The Handmaid's Tale depicts a dystopian society in which a religious dictatorship assumes control of the United States, turning the country into the Republic of Gilead. In this new society, women are stripped of autonomy and often relegated to roles such as servant or childbearing maid. Since the book's publication in 1985, it has become a popular point of reference to guard against government interference in women's rights and issues. This informative edition takes a critical look at Atwood's life and writings, with a specific focus on key ideas related to The Handmaid's Tale. The book collects a series of essays pertaining to feminism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism, creating points of discussion for readers that are both modern and relevant. The text also discusses contemporary women's issues and presents perspectives on topics such as surrogacy, same-sex marriage, and modesty.

Critics have suggested that Zora Neale Hurston s Their Eyes Were Watching God has helped revise a male-dominated literary canon. All-new critical essays touch on subjects such as sight and vision, speech and dialect, and the ways the novel subverts traditional power structures, and more.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, while in Haiti on a trip funded by a Guggenheim fellowship to research the region's transatlantic folk and religious culture; this work grounded what would become her ethnography Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. The essays in Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and "Their Eyes Were Watching God" persuasively demonstrate that Hurston's study of Haitian Voudoun informed the characterization, plotting, symbolism, and theme of her novel. Much in the way that Voudoun and its North American derivative Voodoo are syncretic religions, Hurston's fiction enacts a syncretic, performative practice of reference, freely drawing upon Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Haitian Voudoun mythologies for its political, aesthetic, and philosophical underpinnings. Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and "Their Eyes Were Watching God" connects Hurston's work more firmly to the cultural and religious flows of the African diaspora and to the literary practice by twentieth-century American writers of subscripting in their fictional texts symbols and beliefs drawn from West and Central African religions.