Margaret Atwood’s Visions and Revisions of "The Wizard of Oz"

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.3578

Keywords:

Margaret Atwood, “The Wizard of Oz”, “Life Before Man”, fairy tales, intertextuality, parody

Abstract

L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and Victor Fleming’s film The Wizard of Oz (1939) play an important intertextual role in Margaret Atwood’s critical and fictional writings. Atwood has often been inspired by both versions of this modern fairy tale and has drawn attention to the main issues it raises (e.g. the transformative power of words, gendered power relationships, the connection between illusion and reality, the perception of the artist as a magician, and different notions of home). She has creatively explored and exploited themes, settings, visual motifs, allegorical content and characters (Dorothy, her three companions, the Wizard and the witches, especially Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West), subversively adapting her literary borrowings with a parodic twist and satirical intent. Parts of Life Before Man (1979) may be interpreted as a rewrite of a story defined by Atwood as “the great American witchcraft classic”.

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Author Biography

Teresa Gibert, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED)

Teresa Gibert is Full Professor of English at the National University of Distance Education (UNED) in Madrid, where she teaches American and Canadian literature. She is the author of American Literature to 1900 (2001; 2nd ed. 2009). Her articles and essays have appeared in Ariel, Connotations and Journal of the Short Story in English, and in collected volumes such as T. S. Eliot at the Turn of the Century (Lund UP, 1994), T. S. Eliot and Our Turning World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English (Rodopi, 2001), Transport(s) in the British Empire and the Commonwealth (PULM, 2007)Stories for Children, Histories of Childhood (PUFR, 2007), Postcolonial Ghosts (PULM, 2009), Stories Through Theories / Theories Through Stories (Michigan State UP, 2009), The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (Cambridge UP, 2009), Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (Rodopi, 2012), Traces of Aging. Old Age and Memory in Contemporary Narrative (Transcript Verlag, 2016), Le jardin et ses mythes aux Etats-Unis et en Grande-Bretagne (PUR, 2017) and Representing Modern Wars from 1860 to the Present: Fields of Action, Fields of Vision (Brill/Rodopi, 2018).

 

References

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Atwood, M. 2000. The Blind Assassin. Toronto: McClelland.

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Published

18-12-2019

How to Cite

Gibert, T. (2019). Margaret Atwood’s Visions and Revisions of "The Wizard of Oz". Journal of English Studies, 17, 175–195. https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.3578

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