Search

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author of more than thirty-five books and the winner of prestigious literary prizes, such as the Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Governor General's Award. Her influence on Canadian literature and contemporary literature as a whole is phenomenal. Nevertheless, little is known with respect to how Atwood represents animals covering the full range of her novels. This paper reports on the analysis of animal representations in Atwood's seventeen novels through Python programming and close reading under the framework of a new semiotic research finding, a pan-indexicality model within the context of literature and the environment. This study investigates the frequencies of animal vocabulary in the seventeen novels, the changes of animal representations in her novels before 1990s and after 1990s, and the implication of the ever-changing animal representations during the fifty years. This paper concludes that nonhuman animal descriptions in Atwood's novels of 1970s and 1980s run at a high level and decrease in her novels of 1990s, while scientific animal descriptions increase in her novels of 2000s and 2010s. Nonhuman animals in her novels of 1970s and 1980s are instrumentalized as a vehicle for indigenization and national individuation from the United States, and scientific animals in her novels of 2000s and 2010s are instrumentalized in the service of environmental apocalypticism. This study suggests that the pan-indexicality model can be employed to understand the meaning of signs in literature and the environment from the perspective of authorial intention, with reference to authors' encyclopedic knowledge, personal experience, social, and cultural background information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses an analysis of Burkhard Niederhoff on the return of the dead in Margaret Atwood's novels such as "Surfacing" and "Alias Grace" wherein he mentions the presence of survival in the central theme of Canadian literature. One of the major points of Niederhoff is that Atwood's revenants are not only restored from death into the realm of life but they are also restored to death. It notes that the analysis of Niederhoff deepens with the awareness that the calling of the revenant both to life and to death is attained with the fundamental question of knowledge.

Discusses the interest of critics in Canada on stories about animals. Views about animal stories made by Margaret Atwood; Comment of Atwood on the traits of animal stories by writers in Canada.