Strategies for Identity

Questions of genre, identity and female subjectivity comprise the focus of this comprehensive study of the contemporary Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood. It explores the literary sense of the plurality of genres and narrative styles present throughout Atwood's published fiction, with the purpose of analyzing the revisitation of historical and canonical forms. The narrative possibilities inherent to specific genres constitute the basis of an examination of representations of selfhood in the light of psychoanalytic theories of language and subjectivity that define the subject as heterogeneous and in constant process. Atwood's work proposes a gendered vision of subjectivity, wherein woman is characterized by a multiplicity of roles and subjective positions. Atwood's delineations of the marginality and polyvalency of her female characters are discussed in relation to sexual politics and gender difference. Of primary importance to the study is the texts' emphasis on the determination of sense reception by stereotypes, and on the epistemological questions raised by this in relation to language, the construction of reality, and interpretation.

Auteur

The Author: Eleonora Rao received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Warwick, England. She has been a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto with a Government of Canada Award. After receiving her Laurea from the Università di Napoli (Istituto Universitario Orientale), she participated in the research and academic programmes of l'Archivio delle donne, an interdisciplinary women's study group based in Naples at the I.U.O. She has published works on Gloria Naylor, Anna Kavan, Margaret Atwood, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Virginia Woolf. She is currently affiliated with the Department of Literary and Linguistic Studies at the University of Salerno, Italy.

Résumé
«...this book is a welcome addition to Atwood scholarship with interpretations which are insightful and articulate.» (Sonia Mycak, Australian-Canadian Studies)
«'Strategies for Identity' provides the reader with various critical tools for understanding Atwood's novels and characters and does it with a great deal of sympathy and intelligence.» (Sally E. Parry, Utopian Studies)