Brutal Choreographies investigates the novels of Margaret Atwood, focusing on their psychological and political concerns. Drawing on recent feminist and psychoanalytic theory, J. Brooks Bouson examines Atwood's recurring self, family, and romantic dramas, her novelistic subversion of romance ideology, and her critique of gender and power politics. Bouson also considers the oppositional strategies used in Atwood's novels: their punitive plotting and retaliatory rhetoric, their enactments of female revenge fantasies, and their self-conscious manipulation and sabotage of romance and other traditional plot lines and conventions.