Bearing Witness: Gender, Fundamentalism, and the Construction of History in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran

Objectives: This paper examines the feminist testimonial depiction of patriarchy and fundamentalism in The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood Reading Lolita Tehran (2004) Iranian Azar Nafisi.
 Methods:. incorporates diverse ideas about dystopian literature, testimony, criticism situating individual communion with a collective experience marked marginalization, oppression, or resistance.
 Results: Each book possesses its own narrative conventions space, time, character. While is dystopia which imagines future United States governed totalitarian theocracy, realistic account university professor her life during fundamentalist revolution Republic Iran.
 Conclusions: What these apparently two disparate texts have common that they attack all forms, giving voice to otherwise voiceless, hope promoting political change contemporary societies.