Thesis (M.A.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Arts - Department of English

The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood (1939- ) is known for using Southern Ontario Gothic which is a tradition that emerged in Canadian writings in the 1960s and 1970s and which originally derives its characteristics from the traditional Gothic. In Atwood{u2018}s novels, Surfacing (1972), Cat{u2019}s Eye (1988) and The Blind Assassin (2000), the three novels selected for this study, the Gothic elements appear in a postmodernist form because the Southern Ontario Gothic tradition changed and developed to suit the different literary movements. This study attempts to investigate the use and the significance of Southern Ontario Gothic in the three selected novels. It will also show how Southern Ontario Gothic is a typical Atwoodian characteristic. Freudian psychoanalysis is resorted to throughout the thesis because it helps to explain the Gothic elements in the three selected narratives

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