Xia Yuan: Margaret Atwood: Queen of Canadian Literature

1 Introduction

Margaret Atwood: Queen of Canadian Literature (Chinese title: 玛格丽特·阿特伍德: 加拿大文学女王, 2020) by Xia Yuan, as a volume in the “Women of Genius: Life, Thoughts, and Words” series, is the first Chinese biography on Margaret Atwood published in China, and thus makes a substantial contribution to studies of Canadian literature and culture in this country. This biographical book centering on Atwood, a leading national icon as the Queen of Canadian Literature and a prestigious international writer as the giant of Canadian cultural nationalism, meticulously retrospects Atwood’s growth course, character traits, literary creation, cultural production, broad public intellectual humanistic sentiments, and strong consciousness of national identity. Positioning Atwood in the multi-dimensional focus of historical backgrounds and social relations, it reflects comprehensively the traditional origins, evolutionary stages, and unique features of Canadian national literature and culture. In an overall perspective, the book fully demonstrates Atwood’s significance in the construction of Canadian literature and the evolution of cultural ideology, as well as her profound influence on the changes in world literary landscapes.

2 The book as a model of biographical writing technique

Margaret Atwood: Queen of Canadian Literature is a 343-page volume, and is structured into ten chapters, each with a poetically designed title, such as “A pearl in the forest,” “A flower at Victoria College,” “A place to ignite a dream,” and “A newcomer to Harvard.”^[1] All the chapters are respectively accompanied with a set of elegant subtitles, including “Life in the woods,” “A little lotus sprouting buds,” and “You are happy.” Atwood’s life journey is logically organized into specific themes: family origins and childhood memories, literary dreams and talents, academic performance and literary explorations, love and marriage concepts, bold innovation, and outstanding achievements in literature and the arts. With the themes being interwoven with narration, Atwood’s writing career is well sketched: her support for the Canadian publishing industry in difficult situations, anxiety for the existential crisis of Canada, resistance to the erosion of British and American cultures, defense of Canadian traditions, adherence to national culture, and inheritance of national spirit. In my view, the salient features of the book evaluated above converge to create the impressive strength of the book; and the features to be discussed in the following sections are developed from Yuan’s competent combination of rich primary sources on Atwood and the writing tactics employed in the biography.

3 Significance of the biography for Canadian literary studies

In the Postscript of the biography, Yuan the biographer outlines her steadfast commitment to Atwood studies in China and to the writing task of this book. For my part, in reading Margaret Atwood’s pioneering book Survival: A thematic guide to Canadian literature, an appealing point is that it expounds “what is Canadian about Canadian literature for readers as citizens of Canada” (Atwood 1972: 22), while in reading Yuan’s biography, Margaret Atwood: Queen of Canadian Literature, an impressive enlightenment is that it provides a wealth of information about Atwood’s inspiration for her literary creation and source of her spiritual beliefs – Canada’s northern woodlands, which represent the origin and the developing force of Canadian literature and culture. Over the course of Atwood’s prolific writing career, she has tirelessly probed into the symbolic significance of the wilderness and mythologies in Canadian history, and searching for far-reaching traditional foundations and ways of human existence.

In retrospect, studies on Canadian literature in China sprouted up in the 1980s and have gradually developed since then, when a group of pioneer scholars and university professors introduced Canadian literature into China through the channels of translating literary history, compiling collections of literary writings, and opening courses on Canadian literature at various universities. Li Wei, in her 2010 article, cites examples to show that the establishment of the Association for Canadian Studies in China (ACSC) in 1984 marked a new era of Canadian studies in Chinese academia, while at each biennial conference of the ACSC, the panel of Canadian literary studies would always gather a notable number of scholars who have been dedicated to teaching or studying a variety of themes and genres of Canadian literature. The article specifically states that, in the areas of both researching and teaching, Atwood has consistently been one of the important literary focuses, and studies on Atwood have accumulated abundant output such as research articles, translated texts, and critical monographs published in China (e.g. Wei 2010). In fact, statistics gathered by Zhao (2016) indicate that Chinese literary scholars began to pay attention to Margaret Atwood in the early 1990s, and the number of academic papers published by Chinese scholars on the subject of Atwood by July 2016 had exceeded 800, the highest number of research papers on a Canadian writer, ranking her as number one. Notably, the number of publications in the field of Atwood studies by researchers at Nanjing Normal University, which Xia Yuan is affiliated with, is outstanding, with an accumulative total of 58 research papers, tripling the output of the second-ranked university (e.g. Zhao 2016). Yuan is a young, leading scholar whose craft has been nurtured in fertile academic soil. Along with us she has witnessed the positive evolution of research on Canadian literature both in China and in English-speaking countries outside Canada, and meanwhile has been tireless in promoting the conception, acknowledgement, and development of Canadian literature in China.

However, it is worth noting that there a Chinese biography on Atwood was lacking until the publication of Xia Yuan’s book discussed in this review article. Therefore, Yuan’s biography on Atwood provides a useful reference and sets an influential example for further research on Canadian literature and culture. The unique and complex course of constructing Canada’s national culture and identity has spawned generation after generation of Canadian literary practitioners and masters, conscientious cultural pioneers, and critics who deserve a synthesizing scope of meticulous studies, possibly and potentially through sampling the perspective and the methodology employed in Yuan’s biography-writing technique and her devotion to Atwood studies. The limited space of a review article cannot easily do justice to all aspects of this biography. Only when readers go deep into the lines of the biography can they experience and comprehend the literary sky held up by Atwood, where she sprinkles sunshine and the stars of literary souls on the sufferings and joys of the world.