Lesson Three, part 11

In this class, I would like to talk about Margaret Atwood and her remarkable ability to pinpoint the issues that engage Canadians and readers internationally. These issues are capsulated as the Canadian sensibility, the garrison mentality, survival, Canadian cultural nationalism, immigration and diversity.

She is by far the most popular Canadian writer in the world and yet she has remained remarkably true to her Canadian concerns, particularly in her early writing. To read and understand Atwood is to understand the modern Canadian mentality.

Early in her career she wrote a long poem, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Vol 11, p. 441-45) and I’d like us to explore these poems in class today.