As Reingard Nischik notes, Atwood is “one of the most important literary chroniclers of our time” and an international bestseller; thus, the Atwood industry is “booming.” According to Coral Ann Howells, “From The Edible Woman onwards, her novels have focused on contemporary social and political issues,” challenging contemporary social myths and fashionable ideologies and “endlessly surprising her readers with her ongoing experimentalism.” Critics have viewed Atwood's novels using formalist, biographical, psychoanalytic, feminist, Jungian, dialogic, intertextual, phenomenological, narratological, cultural, postmodern, postcolonial, generic, and deconstructionist approaches. Atwood's novels are variously described as realism, romance, ghost story, thriller, memoir, Bildungsroman, Kunstlerroman, science fiction, metafiction, anti-novel, fairy tale, satire, parody, Gothic, dystopian, nationalist, feminist, revisionist, modernist, intramodern, postmodern, and postcolonial.

As I suggest in Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations, “The issues of power and sexual politics that mark Atwood’s earliest work have evolved.” In addition to the self-divided, alienated, and oppositional characters and character pairs Sherrill Grace helped us recognize with Violent Duality (1980), by the eighties and nineties