On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

Going from reference to reference in these glittering pages provides you with an essential reading-list for life * The Times *
Invigorating criticism * Independent on Sunday *
Biographers, as well as novelists, will find much to celebrate in a collection of essays that is so lavish with quotations from philosophers, essayists and historians... An elegant and thoughtful collection * Literary Review *
Reminds us definitively that she is not only one of our best living novelists, but one of our most astute readers, too. We are lucky to have her * New Statesman *
A rare and perhaps unique figure; a critic whose insights are full of a sympathetic, creative and re-creative imagination...The mind that produced splendid, strange fictions is also a first-rate critical intelligence... A writer of remarkable, broad sympathies * Observer *

Author Bio

A.S. Byatt is a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children's Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her 'inspiring contribution to life writing' and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.