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Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) is the most commonly studied dystopian novel on the AQA A-Level English Literature specification. This lesson examines the novel in detail and situates it within the broader tradition of dystopian and speculative fiction — a genre that uses imagined futures to critique present realities.
Dystopian fiction imagines a society that is the opposite of a utopia — a society characterised by oppression, surveillance, dehumanisation, and the suppression of individual freedom. The genre is inherently political: it takes existing social tendencies and extrapolates them to their logical extremes.
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