In the following essay, Stein offers a thematic and stylistic overview of Atwood's short fiction.

In the following essay, Davey discusses recurring themes in Atwood's short fiction.

In the following essay, Brown explores the recurring images in Atwood's work, focusing on how they function in her fiction and poetry.

In the following essay, Wall examines the portrayal of women as well as the narrative structures in Alice Munro's “Meneseteung” and Margaret Atwood's “Giving Birth.”

In the following essay, Suarez traces the development of Atwood's narrative technique as evinced in her short fiction.

In the following essay, Lucking discusses the motifs of depth and surface in relation to Atwood's "thematic concern with the quest for authentic selfhood" in Bodily Harm.

In the following essay, LeBihan analyzes the narrative technique and major themes in The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye and some of the poems in Interlunar.

In the following essay, Carrington finds parallels between Alice Munro's “Walking on Water” and Margaret Atwood's “The Whirlpool Rapids” and “Walking on Water.”

In the following essay, Lauter examines Atwood's revision of the myth of Odysseus and Circe in her "Circe/Mud Poems."

In the following essay, Thompson offers a detailed survey of the stories in Dancing Girls.

In the following essay, Christ offers an analysis of Surfacing, focusing on the protagonist's quest for self-discovery and Atwood's focus on nature and power in the novel.

In the following essay, Davey considers ways in which Atwood's characters cope with reality by viewing it through fictional frameworks.

In the following essay, Peterson evaluates the influence of legends and fairy tales on Atwood's short fiction.

Yglesias is an American-born educator and novelist whose works include How She Died (1972), Family Feeling (1976), and Sweetsir (1981). In the following review, Yglesias praises Atwood's style and commitment to issues, but finds the novel Cat's Eye an uneven work.

In the following essay, Houghton analyzes Atwood's attempt to construct meaning by drawing attention to and highlighting the “process of exclusion in everyday experience, by focusing upon the inadequacies and illusions of overt fabrications.”

In the following excerpt, Grace finds parallels between Atwood's stories and her poetry and assesses the merits and weaknesses of the stories in Dancing Girls.

In the following essay, Nelson considers the poetic language of Atwood's “Lives of the Poets.”

For Margaret Atwood, life is quest, and her writing—particularly her poetry—is the charting of that journey. Atwood's journey is seldom geographical…. Unlike Charles Olson, Atwood does not dwell on location, physical presence, details of place. Her search is instead a piercing interior exploration, driving through any personal self-consciousness into regions marked by primitive responses both violent and beautiful. Atwood is interested in the human condition, a condition which ex...

Wilcox is an American-born short story writer and novelist whose works include Modern Baptists (1983), North Gladiola (1985), and Miss Undine's Living Room (1987). In the following review, Wilcox generally praises Atwood's Wilderness Tips, but finds some of the prose awkward and over-mannered.

Atwood is a swimmer. The familiar Canadian "underwater" motif, the notion of the self and Canada itself trapped underwater like Atlantis, occurs in the first poems of her first full collection and is repeated throughout her work, reaching a kind of climax in the novel Surfacing. The notions of inner order and outer space, garrison and wilderness, the issue of perspective and of the ways of seeing also recur, as they do in the work of Avison, Page and numerous other writers. Like Al Purdy and o...

In the excerpt below, Smith offers a mixed review of Atwood's Selected Poems II.

In the following excerpt, Lanchester provides a mixed assessment of the short story collection Bluebeard's Egg.

In the following laudatory review of Good Bones, Besner deems the stories in the collection as “fictions for our time, and, arguably, fictions that show Atwood's narrative talents at their finest.”

Margaret Atwood has remarked that her poetic tradition is Canadian…. [Her nearest of kin] are James Reaney and, possibly, Jay Macpherson. (p. 129) Influenced by Frye, both Reaney and Macpherson believe in the power of the imagination to create autonomous poetic worlds. Atwood, while celebrating the imagination, often in disturbing images that recall, for example, Reaney's The Red Heart … or Macpherson's Welcoming Disaster …, is aware of its dangers. In her poetry physical ...

To criticize Margaret Atwood's work would require that I forget how much I admired her. Edible Woman, Surfacing and Lady Oracle had been personal supports for me, sturdy fictions knotted with so many of the unmentionable feelings most women and many men recognize. Surely she would bring to her Selected Poems the sardonic messages of her fiction? But she didn't. Not at first, anyway. The initial awkwardness of Selected Poems, however, only underscores the book's resolution. The Circle Ga...

Margaret Atwood's first collection of short stories [Dancing Girls] … centres on the relationships between men and women…. Atwood writes mainly of the struggles between men and women, of painful failures and of equally painful readjustments. Atwood's women tend to suffer the most in these relationships; their male friends have affairs, or simply leave them, and the women have to shore up their defences just to get by…. [Atwood's stories] range in tone from cool deta...

In the following review, Kemp praises Good Bones as a "sample-case of Atwood's sensuous and sardonic talents."

In the following review, Kemp praises Good Bones as a “sample-case of Atwood's sensuous and sardonic talents.”

In the following positive review of Bluebeard's Egg, Lyons asserts that the “stories have many virtues and sources of interest, including the revelations about Atwood's biography, the exploration of her major themes and motifs, and not least of all, their excellence as stories.”

In the following review, Le Guin provides a favorable assessment of Good Bones and Simple Murders.

[In] Margaret Atwood's new novel, Bodily Harm,… readers of her previous comic novels will find much that is familiar. Here again is the opposition between a superficial world of social convention and a subsurface one of unconscious will, physiological need and barbaric impulse. Again the narrative pattern is that of Shakespearean comedy—alienation from natural order (Rennie's Toronto career), followed by descent into a more primitive but healing reality (cancer and Caribbean viol...

[True Stories] is a worthy successor to [Atwood's] previous works. As in an earlier book of poetry, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, the poet stakes a claim in the world against natural, human and inhuman forces of uncontained, inexplicable oppression…. Through a personae of professional torturers, seen as artistic poseurs, Atwood probes for clues to the insanity and irrationality that mock the life principle. Again, the truth varies and wavers, takes on plausible and implausible facades. In &#...

Margaret Atwood's stories [in Dancing Girls], taken as a whole, express the urban intellectual sensibility of the Canadian sixties with a comprehensiveness and finality that her novels don't attain (and don't attempt). If it's true also that Atwood's lyrics, rather than the novels and criticism, are the main prop upon which her critical reputation should rest—upon shorter rather than longer forms, that is—then it should be no surprise to find this a thoroughl...

You could call it an adventure thriller set in the wilds of northern Quebec. You could call it a detective story centering on the search for the main character's missing father. You could call it a psychological novel, a study of madness both individual and social. You could call it a religious novel which examines the origin and nature of the human lust to kill and destroy. You could call it any of these and I wouldn't quarrel. But you'd better call it a novel to be reckoned with, a st...

In the following review, Knapp offers a negative assessment of Bluebeard's Egg.

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, has one of current fiction's more detached voices. Her tone toward her characters reflects the nature of the characters themselves: women who are divided into separate personae—one half defined by the role they feel society has thrust upon them, the other, their true self (insecure and amorphous as it is) trying to break out. Like many other characters in recent fiction, their lives are directionless; they drift in and out of relationships and find littl...

"In a way I admire her, she gets through the days." That is what Margaret Atwood's characters do—get through the days. In other stories by other writers, these characters would commit suicide or join support groups and we would be forced to recognize them as contemporary victims/heroines…. Margaret Atwood does not write that kind of story. She looks deeper and sees more clearly and she insists that the reader see as well. The stories in "Dancing Girls" are pa...

The most obvious and compelling strength of True Stories is that, like much of Atwood's verse, it seems to grow naturally and with ease from a personal vision no less articulate for its privacy. Reading Atwood has always been like following a guide's brilliant flashlight through an eerie but not entirely unfamiliar cellar. In True Stories the guide has emerged to the light of day only to find the world no less frightening a place. Gestures of love and family and day-to-day life jive in a danse...

[Much] of True Stories consists of a kind of poetic actuality, a continuing oblique comment on the world that is our here and now. It is perhaps the best verse Atwood has written, honed down to a stark directness, an accuracy of sound, yet imbued with the visual luminosity that makes poetry more than a verbal exercise. It tells us not only of the abdication of reason, but also of the tyranny of the senses and the cruel proximity of violence and love. One of the striking aspects of True Stories, which it sha...

[The poems collected in Two-Headed Poems are] of disappointment, political and personal. The "two-headed poems" are specifically the political ones in the middle of the book where the heads speak for two political bodies joined like Siamese twins who dream of separation. Because the bodies are joined at the head, separation is especially risky. And because the heads speak two different languages, words are especially misleading. (p. 12) After the wintry middle poems of our political discontent...

Margaret Atwood's Two-Headed Poems are full of interesting ideas, memorable images, and intelligent observations. She has a deep understanding of human motivation, and her poetry deals naturally with an intricate sort of psychology most poets ignore. Her poems are often painfully accurate when dealing with the relationships between men and women or mothers and daughters. And yet with all these strengths, Atwood is not an effective poet. She writes poetry with ideas and images, not with words; her dic...

Although Bodily Harm is a gripping and horrific narrative (complete with CIA and spy vs. spy reinforcement) it is not merely a suspense-filled adventure thriller set in the Caribbean for an added touch of exotic flair. It is the story of Rennie Wilson, an "options open" drifter who takes a seemingly harmless vacation in St. Antoine to escape the pressures and perversions of her life…. My first impulse was to dismiss the ineffectual and introspective hold that Rennie has on her life, but...

[True Stories] is centred on Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written, a sequence about present-day torture and the brutality of the past…. At moments, Atwood seems damaged by her own security; unable to shut her eyes on "darkness, drowned history," she knows prison cells and death camps by a recurrent ache of the imagination. Some poems are painful to read, for she doesn't flinch from showing us the methods and effects of evil…. Not all her poems are explicitly poli...

In the last decade Margaret Atwood has emerged as a champion of Canadian literature and of the peculiarly Canadian experience of isolation and survival, a theme that runs throughout her poems, three novels and criticism. But Atwood is no narrow, doctrinaire chauvinist…. [Selected Poems] brings together selections from her six books of poetry…. It is fascinating to be able to see the development of Atwood's style and subject matter from book to book in this way; from the beginning, Atwoo...