One of the most remarkable aspects of Richard Rorty’s legacy is the sheer variety of the philosophical imprint from which has thought was formed. His thought not only ranged across Analytic, Continental, and of course Pragmatist philosophy but extended as well into engagements with history, literary criticism, and a wealth of novels. Rorty’s command of such a wide philosophical range is expressive of a kind of metaphilosophical pluralism that was largely missing in his own philosophical milieu and which continues to be sorely needed today. This essay characterizes Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism. It begins with an excavation of Rorty’s metaphilosophy in terms of his signature idea of vocabularies. With this in view, it then turns to a neglected source for Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism. This source is found in an unexpected branch within philosophical pragmatism, namely that of his onetime teacher, Richard McKeon. Like other pluralisms that preceded his, Rorty’s metaphilosophy will be of enormous value just so long as philosophy remains unsettled about how to account for its disagreements, which is to say just so long as philosophy generates needs for addressing metaphilosophical questions, which is effectively to say just so long as there is such a thing as philosophy.

The central focus of this chapter is on variations in Atwood’s perennial theme of sexual power politics, with extensive analysis of early poems in The Circle Game, Power Politics, and Bodily Harm, developing into an extended exploration of the interface between power politics in the personal and public worlds in The Handmaid’s Tale with its current sociopolitical relevance for women’s rights and human rights. This chapter concludes with an interpretation of The Heart Goes Last, reading it through Ahmed’s theory of affectivity, eliding personal and wider political resonances.

This chapter analyzes the recent popular television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, showing how serial storytelling has extended the social and political discussions begun by the novel. Specific attention is paid to the political implications of soundtrack and visual aesthetics, including the series’ allusions to painting, photography, and cinema, as well as costume, lighting, and choreography. The technique of alternating mass scenes, as in the Prayvaganza and the Particicution, overhead shots, and shallow focus close-up is considered. The visual impact of the Handmaids’ costumes extends to their widespread use in contemporary human rights demonstrations. Finally, the chapter reviews viewers’ responses both positive and negative, including concerns about the problematic “color-blindness” of the series. The debate around the series exposes the interdependence of aesthetic, intellectual, and moral categories that reflect a range of sociocultural preoccupations.

Taking as its starting point Rorty’s marked turn to the literary, this chapter focuses particularly on the philosopher’s key concept of “redemption.” A fascinating yet significantly undertheorized aspect of his late work, redemption for Rorty carries spiritual as well as secular significance. It relates to the power of the literary imagination and becomes increasingly important in his consideration of solidarity and social justice. We will explore the development of this concept in Rorty’s oeuvre with particular reference to John Boyne’s 2017 novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies. Uniting the work of Rorty and Boyne, we will argue, is a critique of standard religious practice and an affirmation of the human as ultimately redemptive.

This extended analysis of The Penelopiad, an alternative “herstory” to Homer’s Odyssey, and Hag-Seed, a radical rewriting of The Tempest staged in a Canadian men’s prison, deals with Atwood’s revisionary practices as she redeploys classic texts for her own purposes. Referencing Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, this discussion foregrounds these texts as Atwood’s most sustained adaptation projects, exploring how such revisions involve authorial decisions around purpose, fidelity, commentary, appropriation, and autonomy. Discussion of The Penelopiad centers on Atwood’s reflections on the nature of myth in its contemporary interpretations and on her feminist politics of narrative representation, while Hag-Seed offers a different revisionary perspective with its emphasis on the figure of the author-artist-magician, personified in the theatre director, Prospero’s double. Crossing genre boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow, Atwood exploits the appeal of popular genres while retaining the resonance of literary fiction.

This chapter discusses Atwood’s storytelling techniques within an international context of humorous literary production. Referencing Bakhtin and Linda Hutcheon, it explores Atwood’s extensive comic strategies, identifying and explaining them through the categories of the tall tale and the carnivalesque, multivocality, irony and satire, parody, travesty, and metatextuality. It provides detailed rhetorical analyses of examples of Atwood’s humor with quotations from her short stories and her recent novels The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Heart Goes Last, Hag-Seed, and The Testaments, showing how Atwood the humorist, satirist, and moralist expertly reconciles the double function of literature: to amuse and to instruct.

This chapter offers a comprehensive analysis of Atwood’s ongoing environmental concerns over five decades and her increasingly urgent warnings, referencing her fiction, nonfictional prose, and recent interviews. Framed by extensive discussions of contemporary writings on the deep ecology and radical environmentalism that have influenced Atwood’s thinking, the chapter includes brief critical analyses of Surfacing, Life Before Man, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Payback, with its main focus on the MaddAddam trilogy. In an extended analysis of Atwood’s speculative fiction across the three volumes, Bouson addresses multiple topics relating to environmentalism and bioengineering: “The Perils of the Anthropocene Age: Humanity’s Ecocidal Exploitation of Nature,” “Green Religion and Green Anarchism,” “Crake as Eco-terrorist and Radical Environmentalist,” which features a critical discussion of his Crakers, and “Deep Ecology and Ecospiritualism.” The chapter argues that Atwood leaves the question of future human survival open to speculation.

This chapter presents carefully argued accessible readings of Atwood’s poetry across five decades. It explores her poetics of metamorphosis, moving the argument beyond the “polarities” and “dualities” that preoccupied early Atwood criticism to consider how her poems continually operate in borderline territory, shifting between the world of everyday experience and a mythologized landscape of the imagination. Detailed analyses of poems in The Circle Game, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Power Politics, and Two-Headed Poems, up to Morning in the Burned House and The Door trace Atwood’s thematic and imagistic range, continually opening up possibilities for transformation and renewal. The chapter considers not only Atwood’s historical consciousness and her use of classical and indigenous mythology but also her interest in sexual and national politics, the role of the poet and of poetry in contemporary society, and in her later volumes her personal meditations on aging and mortality.