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.

Dunja M. Mohr, University of Erfurt, Germany, is vice president of the Margaret Atwood Society and the Society’s European Representative. She acts as Head of the Women, Gender, and Diversity Studies Section of the Association for Canadian Studies in German-speaking Countries and serves on the Advisory Boards of Utopian Studies and Margaret Atwood Studies. Her main research areas are 20th and 21st century English and Canadian Literature, particularly speculative, dystopian/utopian, and Anthropocene fiction, posthumanism, post-9/11, monster studies, and new materialism. Together with Kirsten Sandrock she organized the international conference ＂Artpolitical: Margaret Atwood’s Aesthetics＂ in 2021 and co-edited a special issue on ＂Politics and Literature in Margaret Atwood’s Oeuvre＂ for Margaret Atwood Studies (2024). She is the author of the award-winning monograph Worlds Apart? Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias and has (co-)edited several volumes, among them Embracing the Other: Addressing Xenophobia in the New Literatures in English, 9/11 as Catalyst special issue of Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (with Sylvia Mayer), and Radical Planes? 9/11 and Patterns of Continuity (with Birgit Däwes). Currently, she is getting a monograph on Frankenstein Adaptations ready for an international publisher.

Kirsten Sandrock holds the Chair of English Literature and Cultural Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany. She is the author of Scottish Colonial Literature: Writing the Atlantic, 1603-1707 (Edinburgh UP, 2021) and Gender and Region: Maritime Fiction in English by Canadian Women, 1976-2005 (Wissner, 2009) as well as of numerous articles on Shakespeare and early modern literature, gender studies, Canadian literature, travel writing, Scottish Studies, and colonial and postcolonial studies. In 20025, she has received the Government of Canada Award. She is currently vice president of the German Shakespeare Society and has co-edited, with Lukas Lammers, the Shakespeare Seminar Online from 2016-2023. Together with Dunja M. Mohr, she organized the international conference ＂Artpolitical: Margaret Atwood’s Aesthetics＂ in 2021 and co-edited a special issue ＂Politics and Literature in Margaret Atwood’s Oeuvre＂ for Margaret Atwood Studies (2024).