Product Description

As novelists become increasingly interested in history as fiction and fiction as history, this study is designed to redraw the map of the boundaries of modern fiction. In her opening essays - "Fathers", "Forefathers" and "Ancestors" - the author considers the renaissance of the historical novel. She discusses in particular the novel of wartime experience; the surprising variety of distant pasts that British writers have invented; and the new "Darwinian novel", stimulated in part by the discovery of DNA. These afford new readings of writers from Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green to Anthony Burgess, William Golding and Muriel Spark, and other contemporary authors, including Penelope Fitzgerald, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, John Fuller, Hilary Mantel and Pat Barker. Byatt also offers an insight into her own translation of historical fact into fiction in the two novellas which make up "Angels and Insects", while in "Old Stories, New Forms", she explores the recent European revival of interest in myth, folktale and fairytale.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #112964 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
A.S. Byatt is that wonderful figure, a creative writer who is also equally at home in the seminar room, having taught at the University of London for many years, before winning the Booker Prize for her novel Possession in 1990. In On Histories and Stories she pursues one of her most recent interests, developed in her novel The Biographer's Tale, of the "sense of a new possibility of narrative energy" in what Byatt see as "the sudden flowering of the historical novel in Britain" in the last 50 years, in the work of Anthony Burgess, Penelope Fitzgerald, William Golding, Muriel Spark and Lawrence Norfolk. The seven essays that constitute this collection attempt to explain this fascination with history, ranging from the recent attraction of the Second World War in novels like Julian Barnes' Staring at the Sun and Martin Amis' Time's Arrow, via the evocation "of distant pasts" in recent novels, and the use of "precise scholarship" in historical fiction, to a marvellous concluding chapter on the Thousand and One Nights. Byatt argues that telling stories "is as much part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood", and that it "consoles us for endings with endless new beginnings" that defy death. On Histories and Stories is a formidably intelligent defence of storytelling, and rejection of high modernism; it is neither to be taken, nor read, lightly. --Jerry Brotton

About the Author
Educated at York Newnham College, Cambridge, she taught at the Central School of Art and Design, and was Senior Lecturer in English at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999.

Customer Reviews

Literary criticism at its best
On Histories and Stories is a collection of essays - "a writer's essays", as A.S.Byatt herself makes clear. There is no schizoid separation between her writing and critical personas as she claims elsewhere, which means that both literature and criticism, reading and writing, are two points on a circle, where one serves the other. The essays are personal essays in the sense that they portray a personal relationship with the texts she discusses. She is deeply suspicious of modern criticism, which she considers as some sort of power game which does not enable the literary text to be aprehended because it is paraphrased, not quoted. So, it is no wonder that here texts have breathing space because she uses them and quotes from them to illustrate her points of view, rather than having a theory in the first place and then trying to make the text fit into it. There are no critical authorities referred to here, because, as Byatt says, the text is the thing itself, the real thing. It's refreshing to read about literature without the current jargon. I recommend the essay where she analyses the relationship between truth, fiction and lies (if you like her fiction, she provides some illuminating insights into Angels and Insects), as well as the one where she discusses the significance of ice, glass and snow in fairy tales. Although these themes are not exactly new, she made me think about them in a different way - and that's what I think literature, as well as literary criticism, is for.