Maps of the Green World

‘Literature is not only a mirror’, Margaret Atwood writes in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature , ‘it is also a map, a geography of the mind’ (18–19). In many ways, Survival , which Atwood describes as a ‘cross between a personal statement … and a political manifesto’ (13), is both a map and a mirror of Atwood’s own poetry and fiction as well as of that tradition of Canadian art and sensibility which is Atwood’s heritage. Atwood’s subject in Survival , as it is also primary in her other literary essays, her six novels, two books of short stories, and ten volumes of poetry, is an exploration of both the creation and function of art and the assertion of its relevance in social and political contexts. For Atwood, art is a moral issue, and it is the responsibility of the writer/artist not only to describe her world, but also to criticise it, to bear witness to its failures, and, finally, to prescribe corrective measures — perhaps even to redeem.