Metaphors
...areas of Ontario and Quebec, where her father, an entomologist and zoology professor, studied tree-eating insects. Atwood’s fascination with the Canadian wilderness, which is present in so much of her writing, dates from this period. She was eleven before she attended school on a full-time basis.
She received her bachelor’s degree from Victoria College, part of the University of Toronto, in 1961. Upon the recommendation of her mentor, Northrop Frye, she decided to pursue a graduate degree at Radcliffe College, which joined Harvard University while Atwood was studying there. At that time, Harvard was starchy and ultraconservative, and Atwood’s experiences as a graduate student helped shape her feminist views and opposition to the Americanization of Canadian culture. In 1962, she earned her master’s degree, and although she stayed at Harvard intermittently over the next several years, she left the program before completing her Ph.D. By 1967, she was already becoming famous as a writer.
While studying in Boston, she published her first collection of poetry, The Circle Game (1966), which was awarded the prestigious Governor General’s Award. In 1969, she published her first novel, The Edible Woman, an edgy satire about a young woman working at a marketing firm. Over the next few years, she continued to alternate between poetry and prose, often publishing one work in each genre in the same year. In 1972, she published a critical work called Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, which greatly influenced the ways Canadians understand their literary traditions. Still taught in many Canadian schools, Survival advanced an environmental interpretation of Canadian literature and portrayed Canadian writers as victims still imprisoned by a colonial dependency—caught between America to the south and the vast wildernesses to the north. That same year, Atwood...
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