This chapter considers the central place of dystopia in Atwood’s work since 2000 in its discussion of the MaddAddam trilogy, The Heart Goes Last, and The Testaments. The focus is on the contrasts between the trilogy with its epic dimensions of postapocalyptic speculation and the two later dystopias that return to the network of human relations in situations close to our contemporary world. Analysis of the trilogy traces its narrative arc across three volumes from global disaster to futuristic vision, while The Heart Goes Last is darkly comic social satire addressing anxieties around threats to human freedom in the age of corporate capitalism, high-tech surveillance, and biomedical experiments. In The Testaments Atwood reclaims her story in real time with its update of Gilead, focusing on patriarchal tyranny and women’s strategies of resistance, ending with a glimmer of hope. An emphasis on Atwood’s storytelling with its genre-crossing strategies establishes connections between these dystopias, identifying the distinctive Atwood idiom.

This chapter, which considers selected Atwood texts over fifty years, focuses on sexual politics in her representations of women’s attempts to define and reclaim possession of their own bodies and identities. Within a framework that includes feminist theorists Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Joan Riviere, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Bordo, and Wendy Harcourt, the chapter considers the psychological and sociopolitical implications of body denigration. Signaling Atwood’s enduring motif of the disappearing female body without free will, from the early “mud poem” (1974), the chapter explores varieties of women’s self-obliteration and bodily reclamation in The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle, Gilead’s patriarchal domination over female bodies in The Handmaid’s Tale, women’s often ineffectual resistance to bodily objectification in Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin, and disturbing futuristic speculations on the possibility of complete possession of female bodies in Oryx and Crake and The Heart Goes Last through biotechnology and robotics.

The central focus of this chapter is on variations in Atwood’s perennial theme of sexual power politics, with extensive analysis of early poems in The Circle Game, Power Politics, and Bodily Harm, developing into an extended exploration of the interface between power politics in the personal and public worlds in The Handmaid’s Tale with its current sociopolitical relevance for women’s rights and human rights. This chapter concludes with an interpretation of The Heart Goes Last, reading it through Ahmed’s theory of affectivity, eliding personal and wider political resonances.

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.