Parody In The Three Novels By Margaret Atwood

Parody is repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signaling of difference at the very heart of similarity. Characteristic of its playfulness with words, questioning of dominant discourse and reinterpretation of classics, parody plays an important role in the postmodernist context as both a deconstructive and constructive textual strategy.Crowned as the"Queen of Canadian Literature", Margaret Atwood is renowned for her prolificacy and experimental writing techniques. She frequently employs parody in her works. This thesis aims at analyzing the parody of traditional genres in her three novels—Surfacing (1972), The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Alias Grace (1996). By transgressing genre boundaries she makes subversion of the binary oppositions imbedded with traditional genres and empowers the marginalized to speak.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One includes a brief introduction to Margaret Atwood and her literary career, literature review of the three texts and an overview of the evolution of the theory of parody. Chapter Two deals with the parody of gothic novel in Surfacing. Chapter Three discusses the parodic transformation of dystopian novel in The Handmaid's Tale. Chapter Four makes analysis of the parodic rewriting of traditional historical novel in Alias Grace. Chapter Five draws the conclusion that Atwood's purpose of using parody is to deconstruct the ideological impingement within traditional genres, elicit new textual meanings from the postmodern context and advocate the harmonious co-existence both in terms of gender and nation.