Search Results

This introductory chapter discusses A. S. Byatt, a writer with a personal and intellectual dislike of literary criticism that places a heavy emphasis on a writer's life. It first provides some background information on Byatt's early career as a writer and her debut novel, Shadow of a Sun. It studies her commitment to the mutually informative discourses of fiction and literary criticism and her popular reimaginings of the Victorian past. This chapter also studies some of Byatt's novels, which are discussed in detail in the following chapters.

A. S. Byatt's reflection in her co-authored book Imagining Characters was found to be provoking even if she had not been a novelist. ‘Reflecting’ on the book may either mean thinking about a novel as if it were an image of the mind, and thinking that occurs in a novel in which the novel fosters its own mind and space. Time also has a contribution as Byatt points out a parallel between her younger reading self with Fanny Price and Austen. This reflection accounts for the double temporality of the novel and its reading, particularly in the division of consciousness not only between the reader and the book, but between the living and observing life and between the present and past. This chapter attempts to examine a mode of thought that constructs internal landscape.

This shorter chapter is a coda considering the afterlife of modernism's engagements with life‐writings covered in Part II. It begins by sketching how the ideas traced in this study of imaginary portraiture, imaginary self‐portraiture, and aesthetic autobiography figure in experiments in life‐writing by two authors coming after modernism: Jean‐Paul Sartre in Les Mots, and Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory. The second section sketches ways in which postmodernism has drawn upon and extended the tradition of experimentations with life‐writing. Here the emphasis is on metafictional strategies, especially those of auto/biografiction and imaginary authorship. Auto/biografiction can be understood as a strand of what Linda Hutcheon defines as ‘historiographic metafiction’, focusing on the representations of individual life stories rather than on representations of historical crises or trauma. Modernist works explicitly thematizing their own processes of representation (such as Orlando or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) are reconsidered as pioneers of the postmodern development that might be termed ‘auto/biographic metafiction’. Key examples discussed are A. S. Byatt's Possession (as biographic metafiction); Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (as autobiographic metafiction) and Nabokov's Pale Fire (as auto/biographic metafiction). Where historiographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of the historical novel, auto/biographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of auto/biography.

This chapter discusses the middlebrow Victoriana, which depends neither on intrusive authorial presence nor on over-elaborate imitation. It covers the shifting history, politics and aesthetics of postwar fictional Victoriana. Several key novels are examined, including those by A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters and John Fowles. These novels have become commercial and critical successes, and also highlight the uneasy relationship of historical fiction between the present and the Victorian past.

Chapter 2 places A.S. Byatt’s four-volume novel sequence the Quartet in the context of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, a frequent point of reference for her fiction. It traces her engagement with the question of genetic determinism, which she reads through the lens of a debate between Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, and her exploration of alternative theories of ‘soft inheritance’. It notes her interest in neo-Darwinian theories of sex (especially those of John Maynard Smith) and her awareness of the problematic imbrication of these theories with current social assumptions, especially in a period just on the cusp of second-wave feminism. It also considers her reflections on changes in scientific methodology, from the origins of botany in the taxonomy of Linnaeus to present-day awareness of anthropogenic climate change.

The chapter analyzes A. S. Byatt’s short story “Jael,” from her collection Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. The story evokes the Jael-Sisera tradition to develop several themes including the constricted roles of women (or in this case, young schoolgirls), the relation between artistic creation and ethical standards, and the role of cultural memory in moral formation. Her protagonist puzzles over why she remembers the story of Jael, even while she narrates a muddled childhood memory of treachery. The story illustrates the ongoing capacity for the biblical tradition to intersect with individual lives. In so doing, it points to what is at stake in the loss of these traditions in the Western cultural memory.

Chapter 3 explores how two feminist, postmodern novelists, A.S. Byatt and Elena Ferrante, revise a convention in which only male heroes return from Hades as storytellers. Byatt’s Angels and Insects rewrites the Odyssean Nekyia in a Victorian context, as a children’s fable in one novella and a séance in the other, both of which highlight the role of the female storyteller. Set between the analyses of Byatt’s and Ferrante’s novels is a discussion of Gaiman’s children’s novella, Coraline, as a filmic adaptation by Henry Selick, to develop the question of why girls but not women can take trips to the underworld, and to explore the role of the female creator, the Other Mother. The chapter concludes with the work of Elena Ferrante to consider how she incorporates the chthonic female demon and the Persephone myth in the context of female authorship.

Chapter three traces preservation’s antebellum theorization and long-lasting repercussions. The first parts of this chapter delineate the flawed aesthetic logic of preservation, beginning with the earliest proposal for a “Nation’s Park” in painter and writer George Catlin’s Letters and Notes (1844). Preservation emerges as an environmental ethic because indigenous, “wild” natural spectacles are imagined to benefit an expanding, increasingly “civilized” white U.S. population. While Catlin calls for preservation of the beauty he sees in the Plains peoples, bison, and their threatened landscape, Francis Parkman Jr.’s The Oregon Trail (1849) writes of an ugliness in need of violent eradication. Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag (2010) illustrates the pernicious persistence of such aesthetic violence. The final portion of the chapter illuminates preservation’s flawed spatial logic. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) rejects the possibility of whale extinction by insisting that whales have ocean sanctuaries to which they can retreat. A. S. Byatt’s plastic pollution tale, “Sea Story” (2013), plays out the destructive twenty-first-century consequences of Moby-Dick’s romantic ideas about nature. Altogether, the chapter suggests that preservation is an environmental ethic imbricated in settler colonialism, incapable of fostering meaningful human or interspecies community, and whose meagre benefits only continue to diminish as anthropogenic climate crisis intensifies.

This chapter examines critical approaches to women’s experimental poetry in Britain. More specifically, it considers how critics discuss women’s poetry in Britain in relation to feminism. The chapter begins by focusing on Caryl Churchill’s 1982 play, Top Girls, which highlights the difficulty of writing a history of women that produces the modern woman, as well as the susceptibility of that history to occlusions, elisions, and ideologically driven distortions. It then turns to Arthur Marwick’s claim that ‘the much publicised activities of tiny minorities have distracted attention from a very genuine liberation of the mass of the people’. It also analyses two accounts of the 1960s that show women struggling with the idea that looking after the body and its unruliness, socialising and managing the body, is their biologically programmed and socially demanded task: A. S. Byatt’s 2002 novel A Whistling Woman and Emma Tennant’s 200 autobiographical memoir Girlitude. Finally, it discusses debates regarding whether women’s experimental or feminist poetry is a valid and valuable form of political representation in Britain.

The chapter highlights the main trajectories of the book by tracing the movement of Jael and Sisera from ancient Israel to contemporary queer theory. It also explores the use relationship of story to culture, making a case for the importance of a cultural resource such as the Bible and biblical traditions. The chapter concludes with an exploration of A. S. Byatt’s claim about cultural traditions, such as the Judges 4-5 story, vanishing from our world. It suggests that writing cultural histories about biblical stories, be more than an intellectual exercise. It may be a way to preserve and transmit a powerful resource for a common, cross-generational cultural conversation.