Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics

Margaret Atwood's writing, according to Davey, reveals not only an extraordinary facility with language, but also a deep mistrust of it as something shaped by an instrumental and largely male culture. Her language directs its readers to a hidden level of itself - unspoken, symbolic, gestural - and away from denotative meaning. In discussions of her poetry, fiction, short stories, and criticism, Davey offers a 'glossary' of recurrent Atwood images and symbols that can open this hidden level in nearly all of her writing.

Frank Davey
Born in Vancouver, Frank Davey attended the University of British Columbia where he was a co-founder of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. Since 1963, he has been the editor-publisher of the poetics journal Open Letter. In addition, he co-founded the world’s first on-line literary magazine, SwiftCurrent in 1984. Davey writes with a unique panache as he examines with humour and irony the ambiguous play of signs in contemporary culture, the popular stories that lie behind it, and the struggles between different identity-based groups in our globalizing society--racial, regional, gender-based, ethnic, economic--that drive this play.