Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction

Two of the three sections focus on Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood. Examining especially the twentieth century, including second-wave feminism, writers from Tunisia, Turkey, Italy, Korea, the US, and England give both an historical and a global perspective. Utopian and dystopian elements are explored in the Nobel-Prize-winning Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, the little-known Mara and Dann, and The Cleft; and new perspectives are offered on Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.