What follows is largely a meditation on nature as figure in Atwood’s work. thesis from twenty-five years ago is "Nature and Power in the English Metaphysical Romance of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries."Ģ Chronotope comes from my understanding of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, but since the majority of the works I am about to discuss are not novels, I will not pursue the theory of the chronotope itself but rather what it led me to say about Atwood’s work in general. Consider, too, that the title of her almost completed Harvard Ph.
It is therefore no accident that she published a dystopian text in the mid-1980s set in a misogynist, post nuclear future that appears to be the product of our own time.
When nature and power interact I suggest that we are in the presence of an Atwoodian novel. The chronotope thus links the novel with literary history in the sense of the growth and development of novel forms such as the realistic novel, the psychological novel, the postmodern novel, and so on, while it also links the novel with the author’s particular locale. 1 In a paper published recently on The Handmaid’s Tale I make a claim that I would like to discuss further here with regard to other works by Margaret Atwood: I claim that nature and power are Atwoodian chronotopes, a chronotope being a cluster of devices that defines a novel as a certain kind of novel, as having been written by a particular author, and as having roots in its own milieu.
0 kommentar(er)
