Margaret Atwood's Aesthetics: The Artpolitical

Perhaps more timely than ever, Margaret Atwood’s Aesthetics offers novel perspectives on both contemporary and canonical topics in Margaret Atwood’s work with a special focus on the intersections of literature and politics. Arguably one of the most political writers of our times, Atwood’s oeuvre subtly and overtly entangles readers in the dialectics of personal and political power asymmetries intrinsic to her aesthetic practices. The collection takes its cue from the concept of the ‘artpolitical’ as coined by Crispin Sartwell, whose afterword addresses Atwood’s aesthetic and imaginative material world-construction and explores the interrelationship between literatures and aesthetic as well as political systems in Atwood’s works. Individual chapters of Margaret Atwood’s Aesthetics contribute to increasingly burning questions concerning the relevance of literature today by drawing on a variety of critical perspectives, including Anthropocene studies, gender, intersectionality, the nonhuman and the posthuman, Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, risk studies, nationhood, intermediality, and teaching. Chapters offer fresh views on some of Atwood’s most prominent works, such as The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments and their transmedial adaptations, while other chapters focus on Atwood’s latest publications as well as on under-researched works, including her graphic novels and her web-serialized publications. Margaret Atwood’s Aesthetics provides unique insights into the aesthetic and political power of Atwood’s oeuvre, arguing that literary and media representations and cultural adaptation practices contain a significant transformative potential that reaches beyond the page.