Volume “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”: The Bible and Margaret Atwood

Published by Gorgias Press 2020

Volume “Who Knows What We’d Make of It, If We Ever Got Our Hands on It?”

The Bible and Margaret Atwood

Edited by: Rhiannon Graybill and Peter Sabo

Volume 18 in the series Biblical Intersections

https://doi.org/10.31826/9781463241360

Overview
Contents

About this book

In the nightstands of hotel rooms, kept under lock and key, in the poetry of a pre-apocalyptic environmental cult, and quoted by children, atheists, and murderers alike—the Bible is omnipresent in the work of Margaret Atwood. This volume, the first of its kind, assembles cutting-edge literary and critical readings of Atwood and the Bible. The essays span the breadth of Atwood’s work, including The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace, the MaddAddam trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam), poetry, essays, and more. Taking as a model Atwood’s own playful dialogues with the Bible, the contributors employ a variety of theoretical approaches (feminist, deconstructionist, animal theory, affect theory, and so on) to explore both the ancient and modern corpus of texts in dialogue with each other. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the Bible is famously used as a text that structures an entire society—though for precisely this reason it is a dangerous text that must be controlled by the elite, kept out of the hands of those who may turn it into an “incendiary device.” This volume explores what happens when Atwood, and we as readers, take the Bible into our own hands.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Table of Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
List of Works by Margaret Atwood Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
About the Contributors Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
Introduction: Getting our Hands on It Rhiannon Graybill and Peter J. Sabo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I. SURFACING
1. “Always a potent object”?: The Shifting Role of the Bible in Margaret Atwood’s Novels Hannah M. Strømmen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
2. Margaret Atwood’s Survival as Prophetic Canadian Nation- Building Sara Parks and Anna Cwikla Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
3. The Handmaid’s Tale, the Bible, and the Canadian Residential School System: A Dystopian Warning Maryann Amor Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
PART II. IN OTHER WORLDS
4. Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Bibles: “First the Bad Things, Then the Story” Richard Walsh Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
5. Margaret Atwood’s Primordial Myth Jennifer L. Koosed Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135
6. Eschatologically Expecting: Reading Apocalyptic Childbirth Through Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale Alexis Felder Boyer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
PART III. DON’T LET THE BASTARDS GET YOU DOWN
7. “You Should Not Take Baths Outside in the Garden”: Alias Grace, the Male Gaze, and Susanna and the Elders Peter J. Sabo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
8. Writing Re-Vision: On Margaret Atwood’s Rewriting of Canon as Poststructuralist Midrash Robert Paul Seesengood Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
9. The Snake, The Poet: Art and Duplicity in Margaret Atwood’s Poetry and the Hebrew Bible Sean Burt Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	237
PART IV. SCALES AND TAILS
10. Queer Animalities in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and the Hebrew Bible Ken Stone Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	259
11. How To Live At the End of the World: The Bible and Theology in the Climate Dystopias of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler Meredith Mini Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
12. Surfacing in the Wild: The Heroine’s Journey Through the Lens of the Biblical Midbar Sarah E.G. Fein Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	307
PART V. NEGOTIATING WITH THE DEAD
13. Grace Be to You in the Presence of the Past: Ghosts, Hauntings, and Traumatic Dissociations in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and the Gospel of John Sarah Emanuel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	331
14. Mirrors of Grace: Undoing Paul in Atwood’s Alias Grace Jay Twomey Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	357
15. The LongPen, Future Library, and Biblical Prophecy: Thinking Writing with Margaret Atwood Rhiannon Graybill Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	383
Arcane Energy: An Afterword on the Bible and The Testaments Peter J. Sabo and Rhiannon Graybill Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	409

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Gorgias Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 437
Keywords: Literary Criticism; General

eBook

Published: September 7, 2020
ISBN: 9781463241360