Gender and Power in the Works of Margaret Atwood and Zadie Smith
Keywords:
Gender dynamics, intersectionality, literary feminism, power structures, postcolonial identityAbstract
The complicated links between gender and power are looked at in this article through the works of two famous modern authors, Margaret Atwood and Zadie Smith. Their stories have a lot of feminist and postcolonial ideas in them. Through a comparison of a few chosen novels, such as Smith's White Teeth (2000) and Swing Time (2016) and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and Alias Grace (1996), the study looks at how both authors deal with themes of female agency, systemic oppression, and navigating one's identity within racialised and patriarchal power structures. This study looks at how Atwood and Smith show resistance, cooperation, and ways to survive in social and political settings with racial and gendered structures. It does this by using feminist literature theory, intersectionality, and postcolonial theories. Their story patterns and themes are both the same and different, according to the study. This helps us understand the bigger effects on society and ideas. We can better understand how contemporary feminist literature questions and changes conversations about gender and power by seeing how Atwood's bleak vision and Smith's mixed points of view can always be used to talk about how complicated identity politics are.
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