Research Paper on:
Comparing Margaret Atwood Novels Alias Grace and The Handmaid's Tale

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
as a child. There is a freedom in this prairie environment that doesnt exist anywhere else, and for the young Margaret Atwood, it represented Utopia. This rugged terrain  fueled her creative imagination and cemented her reputation as the quintessential Canadian author. There have been few authors in the history of Canadian literature who have been more celebrated  or respected internationally. Furthermore, Atwood is regarded as a feminist and her postmodern texts often explore the trials and tribulations suffered by women as a result of a male-dominated  society. Atwoods heroines bear little resemblance to the aristocratic protagonists featured in the novels of Jane Austen, perhaps the United Kingdoms first literary feminist (Goldblatt 275). Instead, they  are ordinary women who are struggling to survive amid extraordinary circumstances, with their individual identities and sense of self intact. This is particularly evident in two of Atwoods most  popular and critically acclaimed novels, The Handmaids Tale, first published in 1986, and Alias Alice, published ten years later. In each of these tales, there is a strong female  protagonist, who has experienced some form of social injustice and repression. Neither one of these stories are traditional in the sense that there is always a tidy or satisfactory  resolution to the womens dilemmas. In fact, in the case of the intentionally ambiguous Alias Grace, Atwood forces the readers to draw their own conclusions. These texts are  both representative of postmodern fiction in that they dont adhere to the classical structural form. In fact, both works often blur past and present, fantasy and reality, which is  a style reminiscent of poetic free verse, which is Atwoods preferred literary style. The Handmaids Tale is a futuristic third-person narrative told by Offred, who discusses the twenty-first century Republic