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  • Chapter 8 - Margaret Atwood’s Humor

  • Edited by Coral Ann Howells, Institute of English Studies, University of London
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood
    Published online:
    19 March 2021
    Print publication:
    01 April 2021, pp 124-140

  • 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.