Suggesting that politics and power are at the center of Margaret Atwood's fiction, Sheckels examines Atwood's novels from The Edible Woman to The Year of the Flood. Sheckels stresses that Atwood's work should not be viewed as political commentary but rather as a creative treatment of the laudable, but ultimately only partially successful ways in which women and other groups resist the constraints placed on them by institutionalized oppression.

Contents: Preface; Introduction; Part 1 (I) Exteriority: The Edible Woman; Surfacing; Lady Oracle; Life Before Man. Part 2 Politics Foregrounded: Bodily Harm; The Handmaid's Tale. Part 3 Interiority: Cat's Eye; The Robber Bride. Part 4 Exteriority (II): Alias Grace; The Blind Assassin; Oryx and Crake; The Year of the Flood; Atwood overall; Works cited; Index.

Theodore F. Sheckels is Professor of English and Communication Studies at Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia, USA. The founding editor of Margaret Atwood Studies and the current President of the Margaret Atwood Society, he is the author of several studies of Commonwealth literatures and U.S. and Commonwealth political communication.