A prolific writer and versatile social critic, Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood has recently published "Bluebeard s Egg "(short stories), "Interlunar "(poetry), and "The Handmaid s Tale "a critically acclaimed best-selling novel.

This international collection of essays evaluates the complete body of her workboth the acclaimed fiction and the innovative poetry. The critics represented hereAmerican, Australian, and Canadianaddress Atwood s handling of such themes as feminism, ecology, the gothic novel, and the political relationship between Canada and the United States.

The...

"Faint though the voices of the women of Greek and Roman antiquity may be in some cases, their sound, if we listen carefully enough, can fill many of the gaps and silences of women s past."from the Conclusion

Beginning with Sappho in the seventh century B.C. and ending with Hypatia and Egeria in the fifth century A.D., Jane McIntosh Snyder listens carefully to the major women writers of classical Greece and Rome, piecing together the surviving fragments of their works into a coherent analysis that places them in their literary, historical, and intellectual contexts.

While relying...

Acknowledging the importance of Bakhtin s concept of the dialogic, Judy Little utilizes the insights of Bakhtin and theorists such as Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard as strategies for examining the political complexity of the "self" as Virginia Woolf, Barbara Pym, and Christine Brooke-Rose construct it in their fiction.

Little demonstrates that the tradition of the self-as-individual belongs to a complex, intricately dialogic discourse, with the self being an ongoing experiment in heteroglossia rather than a single, monologic "ism." Woolf, Pym, and Brooke-Rose, she argues, manifest a...