Margaret Atwood’s short stories and shorter fictions

Abstract

Surveying earlier criticism of Margaret Atwood's short fiction, one becomes aware of a seeming critical paradox: Atwood is a major figure on the contemporary literary scene, and is the figurehead of Canadian literature; the short story, in turn, has been hailed by the German critic Helmut Bonheim in 1981 as “the most active ambassador of Canadian literature abroad.” Atwood's short stories, nevertheless, have long been passed over in survey works on her writing, have been treated as preparatory exercises, or simply as less important than her major novels and poetry collections. There is indeed always the danger that one branch of a multitalented author's work should languish in relative critical neglect. And there is the additional barrier of an implied genre hierarchy, which, at least in the mind of the general reading public, gives precedence to the novel over other forms of literary expression. Seen from this perspective, the critical fate of Atwood's short fiction for some two decades reflects that of the reception of the genre as a whole. The decade leading to the turn of the century, however, also saw a turn in the reception of Atwood's short fictional prose, with several contributions which either exclusively or in combination with other generic texts by Atwood finally devoted their attention to Atwood's short fiction. From the perspective of teaching, Atwood's short stories have always been a favorite which could perhaps even rival her novels, and rightly so: Atwood's short stories alone would suffice to place her in the forefront of twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century writers. She has thus far published six short fiction collections (between 1977 and 2004), alongside twelve volumes of poetry and eleven novels. Although there are discernible currents and even cross-references linking Atwood's short stories to her poetry and novels, her work in the genre is as free of derivativeness as it is varied. This chapter traces some of its main themes, techniques, and lines of development, taking the prominent theme of gender relations in Atwood's short fiction as its cue.