Temporality and Margaret Atwood

Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s attempt to define ‘What’s Canadian about Canadian Literature’ in Survival is a helpful starting point for considering the way the stories in Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), and Wilderness Tips (1992) relate to the short story genre and Canadian literature as broad, limiting categories. Atwood herself recognizes the personal nature of Survival, defining it as ‘a cross between a personal manifesto’ and ‘a political manifesto’ (Survival, 13). She also acknowledges that ‘several though by no means all of the patterns I’ve found myself dealing with here were first brought to my attention by my own work’ (14). As the title suggests, Atwood’s main thesis is that the recurring theme of Canadian literature is survival. Although Atwood identifies different types of survival (such as Canada’s cultural survival despite the influence of the United States), she believes that the most prevalent type of survival in ‘Canlit’ is simply that of ‘hanging on, staying alive’ (33). Survival was a difficult challenge for early settlers, and Atwood certainly seems correct in identifying it as a formative experience for early writers: