A great novelist, short-story writer, essayist, reviewer, journalist and respected literary critic, A. S. Byatt is one of the leading contemporary British writers. Being a good academic and scholar, it is obvious that her complex and ambitious fictional works are full of her intellectual and literary powers in both content and style. From the early stage of her career, Byatt is a critical story teller who does not separate the literary from the critical imagination and aims at a thoughtful and deliberate commingling of these two ways of seeing and describing the world. She is one of the most ambitious and intellectual postmodern novelists. The Virgin in the Garden (1978), and Still Life (1985), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, …show more content…
In her introduction to the anthology Memory, Byatt views all art as having mnemonic function and as a form of memory. In an essay titled "Memory and the Making of Fiction," she considers that personal memory and literature are closely interconnected. She argues that literary texts are “haunted by, and connected to, the memories of the dead, both the immediately dead and the long dead whose memories constructed the culture we live in and change in our time” (qtd in Steveker 79). By the time, Byatt’s works received worldwide recognition, the term “postmodernism” had gained popularity to describe self-conscious approaches to narration and representation of the kind Byatt exploits in her work. In fact, postmodernism arose in a reaction to realist ways of judging novels in favour of the expectation that novels should challenge the aim of representing …show more content…
I owed a great deal to Umberto Eco. (P ‘Introduction’)
Byatt uses the third person omniscient narrator in the novel but the major portion of the novel covers the letters of Ash and LaMotte, extracts from Ash’s poetry and tales, parts of LaMotte’s epic poem The Fairy Melusine and fairy tales. It also includes Mortimer Cropper’s biography of Ash, extracts from journals of Blanche Glover, Sabine de Kercoz and Ash’s wife Ellen and other characters’ writings. It is a self-reflexive novel embedded with interweaving texts and at the same a critique of postmodernism under the structure of postmodernism. According to Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edwards de Campos:
Its rigorous yet mocking mimicry of both Victorian and contemporary philosophies, genres and styles, its abundance of narrative parody and pastiche, and the unashamedly flaunted parallels of story and time all serve to foreground underlying questions of narrative playfulness and (meta-) historical representation and suggest strong- if perhaps suspiciously blatant- allegiances to the critical ideas concerning fiction, history and identity so fashionable in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In conclusion, it is through these contradictions between history and memory that we learn not to completely rely on either form of representation, due to the vexing nature of the relationship and the deliberate selection and emphasis. It is then an understanding that through a combination of history and memory we can begin to comprehend representation. ‘The Fiftieth Gate’ demonstrates Baker’s conclusive realisation that both history and memory have reliability and usefulness. ‘Schindler’s List’ reveals how the context of a medium impacts on the selection and emphasis of details. ‘The Send-Off’ then explains how the contradiction between memory and history can show differing perspectives and motives.
Literary works are the products of the society in which they are created and therefore display dominant societal values unless the text producer deliberately challenges these values. These works of literature communicate these dominant values and reinforce tropes in our society. One such trope, as communicated in Peter Goldsworthy’s Maestro is that of the larrikin – a hooligan, a trope which conjures up a mental image of disdain for authority, propriety and the conservative norms of bourgeois Australia. The consumption of texts produced in Australia by Australians helps reinforce our cultural norms and values, and aids us in recognising ourselves as Australians. This is done through characterisation, with the characters embodying many ‘Australian’ attributes, and the establishment of setting.
An example of literature is brought up, where for no apparent reason the historical novel became a popular genre and everyone was reading and writing them despite the fact that the genre had been around for a very long time. He used this example to give a concrete example if his idea, and it appeals to the audience’s
In this paper, I will argue that Douglas Coupland in "Player One", incorporates storytelling to highlight the loss of personal identity. This is evidently shown by appearance of Player One, also know as Rachel, technology becoming one, and the lack of rationality with time and setting.
I frankly confess that I have, as a general thing, but little enjoyment of it, and that it has never seemed to me to be, as it were, a first-rate literary form. . . . But it is apt to spoil two good things – a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible-feeding writing that has been inflicted upon the world. The only cases in whi...
On Narrative and Narratives: II. New York: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994-98. 503-26. Print. Vol. 3 of New York Literary History. 11 vols.
Thesis: Shirley Jackson’s usage of irony, characters, and plot portray the stories theme of the dangers of unconsciously following tradition.
It has been stated that the application of memory functions in fictional works which act as a reflective device of human experience. (Lavenne, et al. 2005: 1). I intend to discuss the role of memory and recollection in Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian science-fiction novel Never Let Me Go (2005).
"Genre: Contemporary literature | Illiterarty.com." Illiterarty.com | Book reviews and blogs by Bridget. Web. 16 Feb. 2010. .
The characters of a modernist narrative reflected a new way of thinking. A summery no longer highlighted meaning, it was ambiguous. The ambiguity portrayed unmanageable futures. The Modernis...
Readers become focused with the intensity and strength of the writer. Margaret Atwood pulls the reader in by bring her art and words to visual life. She makes you think about what she is saying and it then becomes a picture. Pictures lurk your mind as you read the award winning books such as, “The Blind Assassin,” a Booker Prize winner in the year 2000. Her books are bought and read all around the world. Her work has been published in more than thirty-five different languages including; Japanese, Turkish, Finish, Korean, Iceland, and Estonian. (Atwood, “Negotiating With The Dead”) She is an amazing person and shows her strength threw her work. Atwood is an award winner of stories and poems’ like, “Morning After in the Burning House,” and “Murder in The Dark” (Atwood, “Negotiating with the Dead”) She was born to write, and a writer she became.
“Writers seldom duplicate their influential precursor(s); rather, they often work within a certain framework established by other writers or generic conventions, but vary aspects of it in significant ways.” (Clayton, 155). Sheridan Le Fanu’s, Carmilla, Bram Stoker’s, Dracula and Elizabeth Kostova’s, The Historian, clearly engage in this intertextual exchange, as evidenced by their use of narrative structure, striking character parallels and authors choice of language.
In the 1950s, authors tended to follow common themes, these themes were summed up in an art called postmodernism. Postmodernism took place after the Cold War, themes changed drastically, and boundaries were broken down. Postmodern authors defined themselves by “avoiding traditional closure of themes or situations” (Postmodernism). Postmodernism tends to play with the mind, and give a new meaning to things, “Postmodern art often makes it a point of demonstrating in an obvious way the instability of meaning (Clayton)”. What makes postmodernism most unique is its unpredictable nature and “think o...
Postmodern literary criticism asserts that art, author, and audience can only be approached through a series of mediating contexts. "Novels, poems, and plays are neither timeless nor transcendent" (Jehlen 264). Even questions of canon must be considered within a such contexts. "Literature is not only a question of what we read but of who reads and who writes, and in what social circumstances...The canon itself is an historical event; it belongs to the history of the school" (Guillory 238,44).
History is no more confined to a monolithic collection of facts and their hegemonic interpretations but has found a prominent space in narratives. The recent surge in using narrative in contemporary history has given historical fiction a space in historiography. With Hayden White’s definition of history as a “verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse” literature is perceived to be closer to historiography, in the present age (ix). History has regained acceptance and popularity in the guise of fiction, as signified by the rising status of historical fiction in the post colonial literary world.