Survival Book Cover


Survival
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
"When first published in 1972, Survival was considered the most startling book ever written about Canadian literature. Since then, it has continued to be read and taught, and it continues to shape the way Canadians look at themselves. Distinguished, provocative, and written in effervescent, compulsively readable prose, Survival is simultaneously a book of criticism, a manifesto, and a collection of personal and subversive remarks. Margaret Atwood begins by asking: "What have been the central preoccupations of our poetry and fiction?" Her answer is "survival and victims."

Atwood applies this thesis in twelve brilliant, witty, and impassioned chapters; from Moodie to MacLennan to Blais, from Pratt to Purdy to Gibson, she lights up familiar books in wholly new perspectives."  —The Publisher.

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Excerpts from Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
Excerpt (pp.27-43) [.pdf] - Queen's University
Excerpt - UMN


Newspaper Articles Regarding Survival
"Canadian Writers Debate Nationalism", New York Times, 1973


Book Reviews
The Peer Review (no date)


Essays on Survival
Re-Figuring Imperialism: Gray, Cohen, Atwood & the Female Body - Christopher E. Gittings
Images of Women's Power in Contemporary Canadian Fiction by Women - Carol L. Beran
Mandatory Subversive Manifesto: Canadian Criticism vs. Literary Criticism - B. Cameron & M. Dixon
Margaret Atwood's Textual Assassinations - Sharon Wilson
Nature Poetry in Canada Since Survival - Ross Leckie
The Maple Leaf as Maple Leaf: Facing the Failure
        of the search for Emblems in Canadian Literature - M. Jeanne Yardley
Surviving Women: A Study of Margaret Atwood's Protagonists - Master's Thesis, Kelly S. Reese







to Margaret Atwood's Non-fiction Works

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This page created on December 22, 2006 by Anniina Jokinen. Last updated January 3, 2007.

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Margaret Atwood has gone on to become not just
a major Canadian Writer, and a woman writer (whom some would call a Feminist Writer),
but an award-winning author of English literature. Her works include novels,
short stories, poetry, non-fiction, children's books, etc.