Abstract
The motif of metamorphosis envelops Atwood’s corpus, and as such this introduction to Atwood and her adaptations focuses on her protean nature; Atwood’s adherence to the revelatory premise of myth aptly underscores the reflexive frames that permeate her storytelling and her very identity as a novelist, poet, essayist, cartoonist, environmentalist and overall cultural figurehead. Myth provides an entry to explore not only the symbolic stage upon which imaginary landscapes unfold, bringing to the fore the vicissitudes of the psyche; it urges recognition of the lived experience of Atwood’s career as a writer participating in innumerable media and genres (from poetry, novels, biography and criticism, to comic books and apps). Though the prophetic feats expected of Proteus seem merely hypothetical in the postmodern age, as the visionary power of myth struggles to withstand the indefiniteness of experience, Atwood replicates its vital function through her involvement in adaptation. The alchemy of the writing self, a magical and intangible process, combines with that undergone by the medium of literature in the rapidly evolving landscapes of book publishing and more widely, of media production, performance and distribution. This is the same mythic intertext that helped lay the groundwork for the discussions underpinning the chapters in this volume, all of which set out to explore Atwood’s diverse corpus as a laboratory for the increasingly protean nature of adaptation.
When, at night, I look at the moon and stars, I seem stationary, and they to hurry. Our love of the real draws us to permanence, but health of body consists in circulation, and sanity of mind in variety or facility of association. We need change of objects.
Ralph Waldo Emerson , “Experience” in Essays. Second Series
All writers must go from now to once upon a time; all must go from here to there; all must descend to where the stories are kept; all must take care not to be captured and held immobile by the past. And all must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation, depending how you look at it. The dead may guard the treasure, but it’s useless treasure unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more—which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of the readers, the realm of change.
Margaret Atwood, “Descent: Negotiating with the Dead,” in Negotiating with the Dead. A Writer on Writing
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
“Duplicity: The jekyll hand, the hyde hand, and the slippery double. Why there are always two,” in Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (29–57).
- 2.
George Woodcock (26).
- 3.
“Spotty-Handed Villainesses. Problems of Female Bad Behaviour in the Creation of Literature,” in Moving Targets: Writing with Intent (1982–2004) (161).
- 4.
Ibid. (162).
- 5.
Ovid (357).
- 6.
“This is a Photograph of Me,” (11).
- 7.
“Introducing Margaret Atwood,” in The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood (5).
- 8.
Lorna Irvine (202–213).
- 9.
Lorraine York.
- 10.
Atwood’s work both as adaptor and as source for adaptation in media as varied as opera, theater, television, film or graphic novels was the focus of a symposium held in 2019 at the Université de Bourgogne (Dijon, France): “Adaptation and the Protean Poetics of Margaret Atwood.” The event was organized by the Research Center, Texte, Image, Langage and the Center for Canadian Studies at the Université de Bourgogne.
- 11.
Jason Mittel (7).
- 12.
Robert Stam (66).
- 13.
Julia Kristeva (37).
- 14.
Adrienne Rich (35). Our thanks to Armelle Parey for suggesting this quote.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
———. Moving Targets: Writing with Intent (1982–2004). Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004.
———. The Circle Game. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1966.
Elliott, Kamilla. Theorizing Adaptation. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020. E-book.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Experience,” in Essays. First and Second Series. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1883.
Howells, Carol Ann, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Irvine, Lorna. “Recycling Culture: Kitsch, Camp, and Trash in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction,” in Margaret Atwood, Works & Impact. Reingard M. Nischik, ed. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000, pp. 202–213.
Kristeva, Julia. “Word, Dialogue and Novel” (1986). The Kristeva Reader. Toril Moi, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 35–61.
Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York/London: New York University Press, 2015. E-book.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. A.D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Penny Dreadful. John Logan, creator. Showtime, 2014–2016.
Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971). On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978. New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 35–49.
Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000, pp. 54–76.
Woodcock, George. Introducing Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. A Reader’s Guide. Toronto: ECW Press, 1990.
York, Lorraine. Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McMahon, F., Wells-Lassagne, S. (2021). Introduction: Stories of Adaptation—Changing Objects with Margaret Atwood. In: Wells-Lassagne, S., McMahon, F. (eds) Adapting Margaret Atwood. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73686-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73686-6_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-73685-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-73686-6
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)