Margaret Atwood's Settings and Spaces (PAMLA 11/13-11/15/22 Los Angeles)
Margaret Atwood’s works are replete with significant spaces: the forest in which Lucy disappears in “Death by Landscape,” Iris’s mansion in the fictional Port Ticonderoga of The Blind Assassin, Offred’s room, haunted by the Offreds who came before her, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Aunt Lydia’s hiding place in Ardua Hall in The Testaments, the rooftop gardens of the MaddAddam trilogy, Kinnear’s basement in Alias Grace, and more. We’re in a Renaissance of Atwood scholarship, prompted in part by contemporary parallels to the events in her dystopias and to the Hulu and Netflix adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, respectively.