Research Guides: Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale

"The Handmaid's Tale" in Novels for Students by Marie Rose Napierkowski
Call Number: ebook
Publication Date: 1998
Includes concise synopses of plot, characters and themes, a brief author biography, discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance, and excerpted criticism.
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (Critical insights) by editor, J. Brooks Bouson
Call Number: PR9199.3.A8H3163 2010
ISBN: 1587656205
Publication Date: 2009-10-01
Edited and with an introduction by J. Brooks Bouson, a widely recognized Atwood scholar, this volume in the "Critical Insights" series collects some the novel's best critics to introduce high school students and undergraduates to one of Atwood's most widely read novels. Original essays by Lisa Jadwin and Dominick Grace lend context to the novel by surveying the political and cultural events out of which the novel grew as well as how Atwood's critics have responded to the novel. Two other original essays by Matthew Bolton and Jennifer E. Dunn explore the novel in light the dystopian literary tradition and feminist literary theory. This collection of republished essays continues the conversation as Coral Ann Howells considers the novel's narrative structure and Madonne Miner and Shirley Neuman examine the role of love in the novel. Chinmoy Banerjee addresses the topic of criticism as commodity in the novel, Elisabeth Hansot and Hilde Staels investigate hegemonic and subversive discourses, and Danita J. Dodson reads the story in light of America's Puritanistic past. Finally, Eleonora Rao offers a psychoanalytic reading that focuses on narrative gaps and ambiguities, and Karen F. Stein and Joseph Andriano consider the novel's metafictional elements.
*available in print & eBook forms

Articles

"We lived in the blank white spaces": rewriting the paradigm of denial in Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale.'" by Danita J. Dodson
Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' portrays the US as founded on a dream of equality and liberty but corrupted by marginalizing Native Americans, African Americans, and women. Puritan prejudice and conformity is intensified in the fictional Gilead, and those seeking to establish an ideal society have created a place of terror. Atwood suggests in this novel that global human rights will remain a fantasy until the repressive past has been acknowledged.
"Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as a Multidimensional Critique of Rebellion" by Asami Nakamura
A literary criticism of the book ''The Handmaid's Tale'' by Margaret Atwood is presented. The author explores the book as an example of a dystopian novel with the central themes of resistance and conflict in a static, prison state. The author emphasizes that Atwood used author George Orwell's book ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' as a direct model for her book.
"The Politics of The Handmaid's Tale" by Gorman Beauchamp
In Canada, they said, 'Could it happen here?' In England, they said, 'jolly good yam.' In the United States, they said, 'How long have we got?'" Such were the reactions, according to an interview that Margaret Atwood gave to The New York Times , to her futuristic novel The Handmaid's Tale . The British response is the calmest, viewing the work, that is, purely as fantasy, like Alice in Wonderland or Lord of the Rings . Canadians feel, apparently, some modest degree of apprehension. But it is in America, where the tale is set, that reaction has been most intense, most alarmed. By now a canonical text (the self-important term that academics use for books that get taught a lot) in university courses, the source of a film and an opera, a work particularly revered by pessi-feminists, The Handmaid's Tale has been widely viewed as a serious commentary on the socio-political conditions of the day. I want to cast a critical eye on the putatively American way of responding to Atwood's tale.

"Suicide as Apocalypse in The Handmaid's Tale" in Margaret Atwood’s Apocalypses by Patricia A. Stapleton; edited by Karma Waltonen
Call Number: eBook
Publication Date: 2015
Essay focuses on the world, societal, and individual definitions of suicide as apocalypse in The Handmaid's tale.