A Critique of Contemporary World: Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale"

Abstract

The thesis analyses Margaret Atwood's renowned "The Handmaid's Tale", showing how the author, through the depiction of a dystopic future world, deals with significant 20th-century issues, such as environmental pollution, racial and sexual inequalities and the dynamics of power and totalitarianisms, for instance, thus criticizing the contemporary world she lived in. As a dystopia, the narrative owes a great deal to Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four". However, at the same time, I demonstrate how the influence of Postmodern literature differentiates it from its predecessors (Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury). Finally, even though it came out in 1985, the novel has continued to be very representative even in the following decades, so much so that in 2017 a tv series by the same title came out.