Margaret Atwood’s dystopian visions: <i>The Handmaid’s Tale </i>and <i>Oryx and Crake</i>

Howells, Coral Ann

doi:10.1017/ccol0521839661.012

Cited by 29 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As Carol Ann Howells observes, in the former's work the narrative is formed 'on the basis of historical and contemporary evidence'. 21 By implicating the logic of historic epidemics and the generic patterns of popular genres such as ecohorror, Human Animals similarly draws on the audience's collective cultural knowledge and subverts their expectations, presenting them not with a graphic, disturbing animal-disaster play, but with a dystopian drama that uses heightened realism to gradually transform fear and revulsion into sympathy for persecuted 'pest' animals. This is achieved most clearly through the character of Jamie, who becomes the voice of animal rights activism in the play.…”

Section: (Sick) Animals On the Stagementioning

confidence: 99%

Pests and People in Stef Smith’s Human Animals

Cowan¹

2021

New Theatre Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Throughout the history of western theatre, animals onstage have invariably been read in relation to human concerns. The reviews of Stef Smith’s Human Animals (2016) at the Royal Court followed in this tradition, interpreting the play’s central animal players as symbolic stand-ins for humans. By examining the particularity of the non-human animals at the centre of Human Animals’ urban eco-crisis, this article aims to rectify previous anthropocentric readings and acknowledge the agency and autonomy of the play’s non-human animals, namely pigeons and foxes. Building on Una Chaudhuri’s ‘Theatre of Species’, this article demonstrates Human Animals’ deep engagement with animal alterity, subverting conventional socio-zoological classifications of ‘pest’ animals and popular preconceptions of pigeons and foxes in British culture. While Smith’s play uses the dystopian mode to dramatize a small-scale, localized eco-crisis, this article highlights how its focus on urban animal encounters and zoonotic disease holds broader implications for re-imagining inter-species relations and planetary health. An award-winning playwright, Isla Cowan is also a PhD student at the University of Glasgow. Her current research investigates ideas of ecological consciousness in contemporary Scottish theatre and is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (SGSAH).

show abstract

Section: (Sick) Animals On the Stagementioning

confidence: 99%

Pests and People in Stef Smith’s Human Animals

Cowan¹

2021

New Theatre Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We can approach this issue by first interrogating why the label speculative fiction may apply to the novel. Speculative fiction is a concept originally developed by Margaret Atwood to highlight that the worlds conjured in The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake are derived from scenarios that while far‐fetched, are plausible from the present viewpoint, here and now (see Atwood, , ; and Howells, ). Even though it estranges the reader from the status quo, speculative fiction hence remains committed, on a basic level, to the literary conventions of realism.…”

Section: Freedom Rides On the Underground Railroadmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bleak dreams, not nightmares

Thaler

2019

Constellations

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Much of this scholarship mentions climate change as important to the novel's setting, but does not deal explicitly with the question of how Atwood engages with it. For example, Howells62 and Korte63 read the novel as a ‘Last Man’ narrative, a genre that explores what it might mean to witness the extinction of human beings, and, in doing so, note the significance of global warming to Atwood's vision. Similarly, Glover,64 Hengen,65 and Wolter,66 in discussing the novel as a critique of instrumentalist attitudes to the environment, nod at climate change as one of the targets of this critique.…”

Section: Literary Studies and Climate Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Climate change in literature and literary criticism

Trexler

Johns‐Putra

2011

WIREs Climate Change

105

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract:This article provides an overview of climate change in literature, focusing on the representation of climate change in Anglophone fiction. It then evaluates the way in which these fictional representations are critiqued in literary studies, and considers the extent to which the methods and tools that are currently employed are adequate to this new critical task. We explore how the complexity of climate change as both scientific and cultural phenomenon demands a corresponding degree of complexity in fictional representation. For example, when authors represent climate change as a global, networked, and controversial phenomenon, they move beyond simply employing the environment as a setting and begin to explore its impact on plot and character, producing unconventional narrative trajectories and innovations in characterization. Then, such creative complexity asks of literary scholars a reassessment of methods and approaches. For one thing, it may require a shift in emphasis from literary fiction to genre fiction. It also particularly demands that environmental criticism, or ecocriticism, moves beyond its long-standing interest in concepts of 'nature' and 'place', to embrace a new understanding of the local in relation to the global. We suggest, too, that there are synergies to be forged between these revisionary moves in ecocriticism and developments in literary critical theory and historicism, as these critical modes begin to deal with climate change and reimagine themselves in turn.Climate change now occupies a primary position not just on political and scientific agendas but in the wider cultural imagination. Just five years ago, Robert Macfarlane bemoaned the dearth of creative response to climate change, asking, 'Where are the novels, the plays, the

show abstract

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake

Cited by 29 publications

References 0 publications

Pests and People in Stef Smith’s Human Animals

Pests and People in Stef Smith’s Human Animals

Bleak dreams, not nightmares

Climate change in literature and literary criticism

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About