3. The Handmaid’s Tale, the Bible, and the Canadian Residential School System: A Dystopian Warning

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Table of Contents v
3. Acknowledgments vii
4. List of Works by Margaret Atwood ix
5. About the Contributors xiii
6. Introduction: Getting our Hands on It 1
7. PART I. SURFACING
8. 1. “Always a potent object”?: The Shifting Role of the Bible in Margaret Atwood’s Novels 27
9. 2. Margaret Atwood’s Survival as Prophetic Canadian Nation- Building 55
10. 3. The Handmaid’s Tale, the Bible, and the Canadian Residential School System: A Dystopian Warning 83
11. PART II. IN OTHER WORLDS
12. 4. Margaret Atwood’s Speculative Bibles: “First the Bad Things, Then the Story” 111
13. 5. Margaret Atwood’s Primordial Myth 135
14. 6. Eschatologically Expecting: Reading Apocalyptic Childbirth Through Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale 157
15. PART III. DON’T LET THE BASTARDS GET YOU DOWN
16. 7. “You Should Not Take Baths Outside in the Garden”: Alias Grace, the Male Gaze, and Susanna and the Elders 181
17. 8. Writing Re-Vision: On Margaret Atwood’s Rewriting of Canon as Poststructuralist Midrash 211
18. 9. The Snake, The Poet: Art and Duplicity in Margaret Atwood’s Poetry and the Hebrew Bible 237
19. PART IV. SCALES AND TAILS
20. 10. Queer Animalities in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and the Hebrew Bible 259
21. 11. How To Live At the End of the World: The Bible and Theology in the Climate Dystopias of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler 285
22. 12. Surfacing in the Wild: The Heroine’s Journey Through the Lens of the Biblical Midbar 307
23. PART V. NEGOTIATING WITH THE DEAD
24. 13. Grace Be to You in the Presence of the Past: Ghosts, Hauntings, and Traumatic Dissociations in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and the Gospel of John 331
25. 14. Mirrors of Grace: Undoing Paul in Atwood’s Alias Grace 357
26. 15. The LongPen, Future Library, and Biblical Prophecy: Thinking Writing with Margaret Atwood 383
27. Arcane Energy: An Afterword on the Bible and The Testaments 409