Abstract
If writing novels — and reading them — have any redeeming social value, it’s probably that they force you to imagine what it’s like to be somebody else. Which, increasingly, is something we all need to know.
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Notes
Margaret Atwood, ‘Writing the Male Character’, 1982; reprinted in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Toronto, 1982) pp. 412–30. This remark is quoted in Coral Ann Howells’s excellent study Private and Fictional Words: Canadian Women Novelists of the 1970s and 1980s (London: Methuen, 1987) p. 70.
Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi, 1972) pp. 15–16, 18–19.
Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (London: Virago, 1978). Future page references in this chapter are to this edition.
Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971) p. 126; quoted Djwa, ‘The Where of Here’, p. 18.
Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (1971; Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1982) p. 249. For an extended exploration of this image see my article ‘“Living on the Surface”: Versions of Life in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women’, Recherches anglaises et nord-americaines, no. xx (1987) pp. 117–26.
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© 1994 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Quartermaine, P. (1994). Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing: Strange Familiarity. In: Nicholson, C. (eds) Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23282-6_6
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