Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt

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Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt Imagining the Real

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Alexa Alfer, Michael J. Noble

Book Code: GM1518

ISBN: 0-313-31518-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-313-31518-3

DOI:

240 pages

Greenwood Press

Publication: 9/30/2001

List Price: $115.00 (UK Sterling Price: £65.00)

Availability: Print on demand

Media Type: Hardcover

Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

Subjects:

Series Title: Contributions to the Study of World Literature

Series Number: 110

Reviews:

Highly recommended for general readers and upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
—CHOICE September 2002
...particularly reliable and useful...The essays in this collection push our knowledge of Byatt's ideas and skills a little further in many areas...many Byatt fans will take up the challenge of these scholars and use their work to push our awareness and appreciation of Byatts work even further in the future.
—European Journal of English Studies August 2002

Endorsement From David Herman
Professor
North Carolina State University: Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt sets a very high standard for all subsequent research on this important author....[T]he volume is essential reading for anyone concerned with the broader contexts of Byatt's work....All of the essays in the volume provide important tools for rethinking Byatt's place within late 20th-, early 21st-century literature and culture.
Endorsement From Dr. Frederick M. Holmes
Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Canada: The editors have compiled-and themselves contributed to-a very fine collection of critical essays on the fictions of A. S. Byatt....The standard of writing and thinking displayed in the essays is uniformly high. Readers of Byatt's fiction will come away from this collection with a deeper understanding of her interests, methods, and achievements.
Endorsement From Dr. Margaret Soltan
Associate Professor of English
George Washington University: This engaging and comprehensive collection of essays on the fiction of A. S. Byatt illuminates her entire body of work, from the early novels to the most recent....Alexa Alfer's essay on Byatt's particular brand of literary realism typifies the strength and sophistication of the collection.
Endorsement From Jennifer Green-Lewis
Associate Professor of English
George Washington University: I enjoyed reading the manuscript and found the collection to be both absorbing and varied.

Description: Over recent years, the increasing scope of A. S. Byatt's work as a writer has fostered a corresponding breadth of academic interest both in the traditional field of literary criticism and beyond the discipline among scholars of the natural and social sciences. Most of this research has been limited to conference papers, interviews, and articles scattered across a wide variety of journals and has examined only the most basic critical issues related to Byatt's writing. This volume provides the first substantive inquiry into her fiction and spans virtually the entire body of her work. By advancing multiple and mutually informative theoretical frameworks for a critical appreciation of Byatt's work as a writer, this book surveys and furthers the growing critical interest in her fiction. Contending that Byatt's work renders the boundaries between criticism and fiction highly permeable, the responses to her work gathered in this volume purposely blur the demarcation lines between the different schools of thought currently fighting for critical supremacy. In doing so, they explore the narrative and intellectual terrain mapped out by one of Britain's most imaginative novelists and contribute to current debates on the contemporary novel in England.

Table of Contents:

Introduction by Alexa Alfer and Michael J. Noble
Of Prisms and Prose: Reading Paintings in A. S. Byatt's Work by Michael Worton
A Modern "Seer Blest": The Visionary Child in The Virgin in the Garden by Judith Plotz
Realism and Its Discontents: The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life by Alexa Alfer
A Tower of Tongues: Babel Tower and the Art of Memory by Michael J. Noble
In Search of Self and Self-Fulfillment: Themes and Strategies in A. S. Byatt's Early Novels by Kuno Schuhmann
"What's Love Got to Do with It?": Postmodernism and Possession by Jackie Buxton
Conclusion in Possession by Jean-Louis Chevalier
Wonder-Tales Hiding a Truth: Retelling Tales in The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by Annegret Maack
"Forever Possibilities. And Impossibilities, of course": Women and Narrative in The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye by Jane Campbell
Writing Natural History: "Morpho Eugenia" by Sally Shuttleworth
Angels and Insects: Theory, Analogy, Metamorphosis by Michael Levenson
True Stories and the Facts in Fiction by A. S. Byatt
Bibliography
Index

LC Card Number: 2001023321

LCC Class: PR6052

Dewey Class: 823


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