How does the context of real life issues link to and affect 'The Handmaid's Tale'?

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James Clyburn How does the context of real life issues link to and affect The Handmaid’s Tale? Wrote by Attwood in the mid-1980s and published in 1986, The Handmaid’s Tale falls within the twentieth century convention of ‘dystopic’ novels, drawing influence from the likes of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. The ‘dystopic’ genre typically presents fictional words based on or set in real-life environments, with suppressive and frightening societal ideals. One of the main themes laced throughout Attwood’s novel is a feminist vision of anti-utopia, or
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dystopia. Written shortly after the election of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, The Handmaid’s Tale is temporally embedded in a period in which revival of conservative attitudes were apparent, and one increasingly influenced by an organised movement of religious conservative who criticized attitudes towards sex in the 1960s and 1970s. Those groups deemed these general attitudes “excessive”, and believed strongly against what they called the “sexual revolution”. This negative outlook sparked amplified fear among feminists that the advances women had made in recent decades would be negated.  Attwood’s novel strongly reflects this by ...

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