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A. S. Byatt and Intellectual WomenA. S. Byatt: Creating the Intellectual Woman

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women: A. S. Byatt: Creating the Intellectual Woman [This chapter takes the Romantic genius as its first example of this process, and one in which Byatt’s fiction takes a telling and illuminating interest. To analyse why Byatt’s literary interventions here are so important, I return to Michel Foucault’s understanding of discourse, Coupe’s of mythopoeia and Hayden White’s of historical knowledge. Byatt’s depictions of masculine ‘genius’ exert discursive dominance (and cultural prominence and status) in limited ways, particularly alongside feminine, imaginative intellectual activity. This chapter will observe this process in Byatt’s mythopoeic appropriations of ‘genius’ and their presuppositions (e.g. of public work and status, and masculine life) in The Shadow of the Sun (1964), her first collection of short stories Sugar and Other Stories (1987) and two later collections The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994) and Elementals (1998).] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual WomenA. S. Byatt: Creating the Intellectual Woman

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Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
ISBN
978-3-031-08670-0
Pages
43 –77
DOI
10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_2
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[This chapter takes the Romantic genius as its first example of this process, and one in which Byatt’s fiction takes a telling and illuminating interest. To analyse why Byatt’s literary interventions here are so important, I return to Michel Foucault’s understanding of discourse, Coupe’s of mythopoeia and Hayden White’s of historical knowledge. Byatt’s depictions of masculine ‘genius’ exert discursive dominance (and cultural prominence and status) in limited ways, particularly alongside feminine, imaginative intellectual activity. This chapter will observe this process in Byatt’s mythopoeic appropriations of ‘genius’ and their presuppositions (e.g. of public work and status, and masculine life) in The Shadow of the Sun (1964), her first collection of short stories Sugar and Other Stories (1987) and two later collections The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994) and Elementals (1998).]

Published: Aug 31, 2022

Keywords: Romanticism; Genius; Gender; Discourse; Historical knowledge

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