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Chapter 8 - Margaret Atwood’s Humor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2021

By
Marta Dvořák
Edited by
Coral Ann Howells
Coral Ann Howells
Affiliation:
Institute of English Studies, University of London
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Summary

This chapter discusses Atwood’s storytelling techniques within an international context of humorous literary production. Referencing Bakhtin and Linda Hutcheon, it explores Atwood’s extensive comic strategies, identifying and explaining them through the categories of the tall tale and the carnivalesque, multivocality, irony and satire, parody, travesty, and metatextuality. It provides detailed rhetorical analyses of examples of Atwood’s humor with quotations from her short stories and her recent novels The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Heart Goes Last, Hag-Seed, and The Testaments, showing how Atwood the humorist, satirist, and moralist expertly reconciles the double function of literature: to amuse and to instruct.

Keywords

comedytall taleburlesquecarnivalesqueparodyironysatireOryx and CrakeThe Heart Goes LastThe Testaments
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood , pp. 124 - 140
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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