About the lecture

In this module, we think about some of the contexts that are important to keep in mind when reading the novel. In particular, we think about where and when Atwood wrote the novel, her engagement with contemporary politics – both the totalitarianism of Soviet Russia and the religious extremism of the New Right in the United States –, and the influence of texts such Anne Frank's Diary, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

About the lecturer

Madeleine Davies is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Reading. She specialises in Women's Writing and Feminist Theory, particularly the work of Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood. She has published widely on Margaret Atwood in particular, including 'Margaret Atwood's Female Bodies' in C. A. Howells (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (2006).