The Art of Recording Li(v)es in A.S. Byatt’s Fiction
The questions about the representation of the past that are the centre of historiographic metafiction or neo-historical fiction also feature at the heart of Antonia Byatt’s œuvre. A number of her texts stress first how the past, whether it be personal collective or cultural, is difficult to know, an...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2018-04-01
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| Series: | Études Britanniques Contemporaines |
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| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/4330 |
| Summary: | The questions about the representation of the past that are the centre of historiographic metafiction or neo-historical fiction also feature at the heart of Antonia Byatt’s œuvre. A number of her texts stress first how the past, whether it be personal collective or cultural, is difficult to know, and second, how it is the product of art, a fabrication. This paper looks in particular at ‘Precipice-Encurled’ (1987), Possession, a Romance (1990) and The Biographer’s Tale (2000) that evoke the process of unearthing the past, piecing it together and arranging it into a tale notably via characters of scholars or biographers who record lives, and in doing so may be telling lies. These characters will provide an entry into the process of (re)-construction at work in Byatt’s fiction before we move on to ‘Sugar’ (1987), an autobiographical text that features the unofficial reconfiguring or fictionalising at work in personal memories of a family’s past. |
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| ISSN: | 1168-4917 2271-5444 |