True Trash
Genre Fiction Revisited In Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress, The Heart Goes Last, And Hag-Seed
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12920148 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Coral Ann Howells (0000-0001-5466-9488, University of Reading, corresponding author), Coral Howells |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 297-315 |
| Publication date | 2017-05-17 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Contemporary Women s Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1754-1476 • E-ISSN: 1754-1484 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/cww/vpx010 |
| OpenAlex | W2614856492 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 6 |
Margaret Atwood, an enthusiast for popular fiction since childhood, has frequently described its appeal for her: “I find popular forms interesting because they are collective mythology – a wonderful compost that contains everything. It contains the cultural patterns of the society, and what novels are using are the themes of their culture. Every time” (“How to Spot a Killer” 17). Throughout her fifty-year writing career, Atwood’s wonderfully inventive use of popular fictional forms has been a consistent feature of her work. Since the first collection of critical essays in The Malahat Review: Margaret Atwood: A Symposium (1977), scholars have been investigating her subversive rewriting of popular genres as significant elements in her novels, short fictions, and poetry, seeing them variously as components of her postmodern aesthetic and her narrative experimentalism with its feminist inflections, and her critique of contemporary social and political issues. Indeed, Atwood herself has been a major commentator on genre fiction in interviews and essays and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011), where she wittily distinguishes between realistic novels (“the novel proper”) and those “of lesser solemnity” called ‘genre fiction’ . . . the spy thriller and the crime story and the adventure story and the supernatural tale and the science fiction” (Other Worlds 57–58). That enthusiasm for popular forms continues undiminished in her recent fictions since the MaddAddam trilogy with Stone Mattress (2014), The Heart Goes Last (2015), and her retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Hag-Seed (2016). Now ironically describing herself as ‘an award-winning nice literary old lady’ (Angel Catbird 2016, Introduction), Atwood has shifted the emphases in her storytelling, challenging realist conventions as she revisits an array of popular genres, constructing what we might describe as transgressive entertainments. While she references the idioms and new technologies of contemporary culture, she seeks as always to engage readers with her seriously held ethical values, which are embedded in the texts themselves. “Not real can tell us about real” (Oryx and Crake 118), and it this latest stage in the evolution of Atwood’s narrative art that I investigate in this essay
Art · Art history · Literature · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Short Stories in Global Literature · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |