Questions of genre identity and female subjectivity comprise the focus of this comprehensive
study of the contemporary Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood. It explores the literary
sense of the plurality of genres and narrative styles present throughout Atwood's published
fiction with the purpose of analyzing the revisitation of historical and canonical forms. The
narrative possibilities inherent to specific genres constitute the basis of an examination of
representations of selfhood in the light of psychoanalytic theories of language and
subjectivity that define the subject as heterogeneous and in constant process. Atwood's work
proposes a gendered vision of subjectivity wherein woman is characterized by a multiplicity of
roles and subjective positions. Atwood's delineations of the marginality and polyvalency of her
female characters are discussed in relation to sexual politics and gender difference. Of
primary importance to the study is the texts' emphasis on the determination of sense reception
by stereotypes and on the epistemological questions raised by this in relation to language
the construction of reality and interpretation.
