Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad - Riscrivere il Canone

Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad (2005) can be read through various perspectives: as a feminist work due to Penelope and her maids as challenging narrators, or as a post-modern text due to its gothic style and vulgar language, or as a complex work for its mixture of various narrative genres. However, its 'writing-back to the canon' is the most fascinating. In this dissertation, I will focus on postcolonial writers and Margaret Atwood. Their purpose of going back to canonical narratives to give birth to modern versions of classics is indeed challenging and fascinating. In this text, I will firstly discuss Atwood's use of burlesque and parodic devices in re-writing the Odyssey by means of the academic essays of Hilde Staels and Earl Ingersoll. Afterwards, I will shortly introduce some of the main features of Postcolonial Literature and explain its purpose of searching the origins of stereotypical ideologies in canonical classics through the words of the scholars John Thieme and Edward Said. In the second chapter I will also focus on how The Penelopiad is deeply related to this modern literary field and how it discusses categories of gender and class by quoting the academic works of Earl Ingersoll, Coran Ann Howells, Mihoko Suzuki and Sarah Hemming. In the last chapter, I will show again how Margaret Atwood's novella is connected to the Postcolonial Literature. I will also describe 'its writing back approach' by outlining the similarities that I personally have found between Atwood's The Penelopiad and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. Through the academic works of various scholars such as Sarah Hemming, Coral Ann Howells, Earl G Ingersoll, Edward Said, Hilde Staels, John Thieme and Mihoko Suzuki, I will therefore discuss Atwood's personal way of re-interpreting the Homeric Odyssey and some of its stereotypical characters and images.