The Role of Language in Constructing Dystopian Reality in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative and Science Fiction

Zavatska I. The Role of Language in Constructing Dystopian Reality in Margaret Atwood’s Speculative and Science Fiction : master’s thesis : 035 Philology / supervised Tetiana Biletska. Kyiv, 2023. 114 p.

The current study is devoted to language as the constituent part of forming dystopian worlds in M. Atwood’s novels The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments and the MaddAddam trilogy. The topicality of the study is predetermined by the fact that M. Atwood’s fiction has recently provoked significant interest. Her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, regained relevance with a television series adaptation, leading M. Atwood to publish a sequel, The Testaments. The popularity of her MaddAddam trilogy grew during the Covid pandemic due to its themes of ecological disaster and unchecked scientific advancement. Subsequently, the dystopian themes raised in the novels and the language used to portray them have attracted the attention of numerous readers and scholars.
Consequently, based on the understanding of the level of interest among researchers and the public in everything that is connected with M. Atwood’s speculative and science fiction, the purpose of the study is to examine the use of language, namely of lexical, phonetic, graphic, and syntactic expressive means used by M. Atwood when constructing dystopian realities in her speculative and science fiction novels The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments and the MaddAddam trilogy.