Word: handmaid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most enduring monster: Frankenstein. Two years later, she was convincingly Californian in Paul Schrader's oneiric docudrama about Patty Hearst - another nightmare role that she approached with the passion and, especially, the precision of a mature actress. She was also exemplary as the star of the 1990 film The Handmaid's Tale, from Margaret Atwood's novel (and Harold Pinter's screenplay), in which she plays a lonely, stubborn rebel in a brutal, sterile future society...
...plays became sparer and less frequent, he remained an industrious producer of scripts, especially for the movies. Assigned all manner of British novels to adapt, he turned virtually all of them - The Servant, The Pumpkin Eater, The Quiller Memorandum, Accident, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Handmaid's Tale - into parables of class inequity and betrayed alliances. (He also did a starchy version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and, for his last script, an ugly botch of the Anthony Shaffer thriller Sleuth.) He directed other men's plays, notably Simon Gray's (Butley...
...global recession, there are a lot of people thinking and writing about debt. But few of them are Booker Prize--winning novelists, and that's what makes Payback--equal parts philosophical essay, literary criticism and historical narrative--a compelling project from the start. The author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin examines the science of give-and-take, from evolution (studies of chimpanzees' innate concept of fair play) to religion (themes of redemption in Christian theology) to literature--where Atwood realizes that debt drives many a plot (Vanity Fair, A Christmas Carol). And what happens when...
...which the angel Gabriel greets Mary with the lines Catholics have often recited as "Hail, Mary, full of grace." It continues with a much more complete description of what came to be known as the virginal conception, and goes on through Mary's acceptance: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word...
...style reverence) or was granted it on an as-needed basis. These days, however, some feminist readers like Vanderbilt University's Amy-Jill Levine, editor of the forthcoming Feminist Companion to Mariology, are more interested in what might be called Mary's feistiness. After all, Levine points out, the handmaid line does not follow immediately upon the angel's tidings that "thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and call his name Jesus ..." Rather, Mary poses the logical query, "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" Says Levine: "She asks, 'How's that...