Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood (review)

In Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood, Reingard M. Nischik investigates the intersection of genre and gender as an enduring preoccupation for Margaret Atwood throughout the five decades of her literary career. Approaching genres as dynamic, rhetorical strategies with the capacity to critique socio-cultural norms and raise political consciousness, Nischik describes her concept of “engendering genre” as the ways in which both genre and gender construct each other, sometimes with subversive effects (4). In Nischik’s estimation, Atwood has been particularly innovative and versatile in her challenging of genre and gender conventions, making her diverse body of work “a significant cultural document of our times” (14). This ambitious study offers a comprehensive examination of the generic range and temporal scope of Atwood’s oeuvre. The book examines everything from Atwood’s love poetry and novels to film adaptations of her work, culminating in an original study of her cartoons (a number of which are reprinted here). The end result is an invaluable study of Atwood’s experimentation with genre: how she uses and challenges form to address gender politics and to reimagine alternative modes of being for both men and women.

Divided into seven chapters according to genre (with the eighth and final chapter being an interview with Atwood), Engendering Genre adopts a pragmatic organization for its encompassing survey of Atwood’s career and breadth of generic experimentation. The detailed analysis of Power Politics in chapter 1 is particularly rich in its argumentation, positioning Atwood’s text as a radical deviation from traditions of love poetry in its inversion of binaries associated with both men and women. Chapter 2 carries forward this focus on inversion through an examination of Atwood’s intertextual short fiction and prose poems. Nischik aptly describes the “category-defying originality” (50) of many of the pieces in Murder in the Dark and Good Bones and how Atwood, through her playful feminist revision of Charles Baudelaire’s prose poems, “imported a largely unfamiliar genre into English Canadian literature” (51). Chapters 3 and 4 offer extensive surveys of Atwood’s short stories and novels, respectively, tracing the construction of gender relationships and forms of address. Chapter 5 continues to explore the novel genre but examines Atwood as an “intermedial writer” (131), considering in detail German director Volker Schlöndorff’s translation of The Handmaid’s Tale to feature film. In keeping with the survey-like approach of chapters 3 and 4, chapter 6 traces gender-related themes and issues in Atwood’s criticism and her efforts to shape essays in ways that are accessible and engaging for the public. Nischik’s examination of Atwood’s role as cartoonist in chapter 7 makes a significant contribution, being the first extended publication on this topic at a time when the research and teaching of comics and graphic novels are gaining a prominent foothold in academia.

Quoting authorities who study genre both in general (Frans de Bruyn, Chris Baldick, Linda Hutcheon) and in the context of scholarship on Atwood specifically (Coral Ann Howells, Sharon Wilson), Nischik emphasizes Atwood’s subversive boundary crossing when it comes to both the categories and conventions of genre. It is somewhat disappointing, then, that with respect to the organization of the chapters of her own study Nischik does not opt to cross more boundaries within the chapters themselves by placing different genres in direct and extended relation to each other. Nischik compensates for this adherence to category, however, by diligently cross-referencing the chapters, as she does, for instance, in chapter 2 when introducing Atwood’s playful use of the dichotomy of the small and the large with respect to her shorter fictions. At the same time, she gestures toward the cartoon drawings (in chapter 7) that similarly explore gendered perceptions of size and bodily proportion. Where readers are most rewarded with respect to explicit border crossings between genres is in chapter 5’s investigation of how The Handmaid’s Tale, which modifies the conventions of dystopian...