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Examining Margaret Atwood's work in the context of the complex history of the Bildungsroman, Ellen McWilliams explores how the genre has been appropriated by women writers in the second half of the twentieth century. She demonstrates that Atwood's early work – her own 'coming of age' fiction, including unpublished works as well as The Edible Woman, Surfacing, and Lady Oracle – both engages with and works against the paradigms of identity which are traditionally associated with the genre. Making extensive use of unpublished manuscripts in the Atwood Collection at the University of Toronto, McWilliams uncovers influences that shaped Atwood's fashioning of identity in her early novels, paying particular attention to Atwood's preoccupation with survival as a key symbol of Canadian literature, culture, and identity. She also considers the genre's afterlife on display in Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and Moral Disorder, in which the formulations of selfhood and identity in Atwood's early fiction are revisited and developed. Atwood emerges as a writer who self-consciously invokes and then undercuts the traditions of the Bildungsroman, a turn that may be read as a means of at once interrogating and perpetuating the form. McWilliams's book furthers our understanding of subjectivity in Atwood's fiction and contributes to ongoing conversations about the role gender and cultural contexts play in reframing generic boundaries.

Women and literature --- Bildungsromans, Canadian --- History --- History and criticism --- Atwood, Margaret, --- Criticism and interpretation --- History and criticism. --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Women and literature - Canada - History - 20th century --- Bildungsromans, Canadian - History and criticism --- Atwood, Margaret, - 1939- - Criticism and interpretation --- Atwood, Margaret (1939-....) --- Femmes écrivains canadiennes de langue anglaise --- Littérature --- Critique et interprétation --- Femmes écrivains --- Canada --- 20e siècle --- Atwood, Margaret, - 1939 --- -Women and literature

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'This is a lively, thought-provoking, engrossing, and eminently readable study of cross-connections in North American women's writing. Irishness in North American Women's Writing: Transatlantic Affinities is a timely, original, and richly observant study of six diverse women writers and a valuable intervention in the field of transatlantic studies.' - Anne Fogarty, University College Dublin, Ireland 'This absorbing, historically informed study further enhances Ellen McWilliams' scholarly credentials in the field of Irish diasporic literary studies. Written in a lucid, accessible style, her book is an essential tool for those who wish to deepen their understanding of the subtleties of the transatlantic exchanges that make the work of these six North American women writers so compelling.' -Liam Harte, University of Manchester, UK 'Ellen McWilliams' ground-breaking study, Irishness in North American Women's Writing: Transatlantic Affinities, extends the critical landscape on major Irish-American and Irish-Canadian women authors: her nuanced investigations excitingly broaden transatlantic studies and complicate essentialist readings of Irish, Canadian, and American nationalism. Furthermore, by examining Irish-Canadian women's literature, the volume addresses an enormous critical gap.' - Kate Costello-Sullivan, Le Moyne College, New York, USA This book examines ideas of Irishness in the writing of Mary McCarthy, Maeve Brennan, Alice McDermott, Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Emma Donoghue. Individual chapters engage in detail with questions central to the social or literary history of Irish women in North America and pay special attention to the following: discourses of Irish femininity in twentieth-century American and Canadian literature; mythologies of Irishness in an American and Canadian context; transatlantic literary exchanges and the influence of canonical Irish writers; and ideas of exile in the work of diasporic women writers.

Fiction --- American literature --- Literature --- literatuur --- fantasie (verbeelding) --- anno 1900-1999 --- America

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Irish literature --- National characteristics, Irish --- History and criticism --- Ireland --- History