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A. S. Byatt and Intellectual WomenFictions and Future Histories of Intellectual Women

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women: Fictions and Future Histories of Intellectual Women [In A. S. Byatt’s best-known works of historical fiction Possession: A Romance (1990), Angels and Insects (1992) and The Children’s Book (2009), her historiographic and mythopoeic projects crystallise into a feminist remythologisation of historical narrative. These fictions’ feminist strategies and tropes, including but not limited to hidden letters and poetry, fairy tales and interior monologues that seem to shape history itself and its ideological strategies, refer to and exploit the defining features of the figure of the intellectual that claims (hollowly) paradigmatic status, as they are set out by Edward W. Said in particular: the critical sense, the willingness to think through and past conventional ideas and the capacity to think and communicate on one’s own terms, separately from the ‘body’ of a society and culture. Byatt’s fictions succeed in altering our conceptualisations of intellectual women in the past and the present because, just as the accepted features and events of history often ‘change’ conclusively owing to critical thought and research (as do the narratives of Ash and LaMotte’s lives in Possession), our sense of history can be productively broadened to include many possible and probable narratives.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual WomenFictions and Future Histories of Intellectual Women

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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
183 –215
DOI
10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_6
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[In A. S. Byatt’s best-known works of historical fiction Possession: A Romance (1990), Angels and Insects (1992) and The Children’s Book (2009), her historiographic and mythopoeic projects crystallise into a feminist remythologisation of historical narrative. These fictions’ feminist strategies and tropes, including but not limited to hidden letters and poetry, fairy tales and interior monologues that seem to shape history itself and its ideological strategies, refer to and exploit the defining features of the figure of the intellectual that claims (hollowly) paradigmatic status, as they are set out by Edward W. Said in particular: the critical sense, the willingness to think through and past conventional ideas and the capacity to think and communicate on one’s own terms, separately from the ‘body’ of a society and culture. Byatt’s fictions succeed in altering our conceptualisations of intellectual women in the past and the present because, just as the accepted features and events of history often ‘change’ conclusively owing to critical thought and research (as do the narratives of Ash and LaMotte’s lives in Possession), our sense of history can be productively broadened to include many possible and probable narratives.]

Published: Aug 31, 2022

Keywords: Historical fiction; Historical narrative; Historiographic metafiction; Neo-Victorianism; Fairy tales

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