Research Paper On Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, born 1939, poet, novelist, literary critic and story writer, is a prominent figure in the contemporary Canadian Literature. She was born in Ottawa in Canada in 1939 and raised in Toronto. She graduated from the University of Toronto in 1961 and did her Masters from Redcliff College, Harvard University, in 1962. She came into limelight with the Governor General’s Award for her anthology of poems entitled The Circle Game (1966). This was followed by the publication of Survival (1972) which brought her further acclaim. The same year, Surfacing, with its feminist and nationalist slant, established her reputation internationally. Since the appearance of her first book of poems, Double Persephone (1961), Atwood has published several

According to Frye, it was formula writing. Margaret Atwood herself reiterated this fact in ‘‘Surviving the Eighties’’ when she said. ‘‘Although we wanted to become writers, we certainly didn’t want to become Canadian writers…’’ A Canadian writer for her was an ‘‘oxymoron’’. According to her, ‘‘one could hardly expect us to make a living at it, and anything resembling the American notion of literary success was out of the question. Canadian books were routinely not taught in schools and universities. I myself have never taken a course on Canadian Literature’’. Like other writers of her time, she also read Sartre and Beckett. ‘‘Literature’’ meant British literature with Shakespeare, Eliot, Austen, Thomas Hardy, Keats and Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron. It was at Harvard that Atwood first began to think seriously about Canada. Therefore, she was not only influenced by Northrop Frye and Hardward’s Perry Miller but also by her predecessors like A. J. M. Smith, Dorothy Livesay and Al Purdy. The poetry of Pratt, Jay MacPherson, Margaret Avison, P. K. Page and Davidson attracted her and moulded her literary career. According to