Academia and Reviews

Peacock and Vine

This ravishing book opens a window onto the lives, designs, and passions of two charismatic artists. Born a generation apart, they were seeming opposites: Mariano Fortuny, a Spanish aristocrat thrilled by the sun-baked cultures of Crete and Knossos; William Morris, a British craftsman, in thrall to the myths of the North. Yet through their revolutionary inventions and textiles, both men inspired a new variety of art, as vibrant today as when it was first conceived. Byatt traces their genius right to the source..

Portraits in Fiction

 Portraits seem the opposite of fiction, fixed in time and space, not running with the curve of a story or a life. Yet since the birth of the novel, writers have been fascinated by portraits as icons, as motifs, as images of character and evocations of past time. In this intriguing, provocative little book, A.S. Byatt delves into the complex relations between portraits and characters, and between portraits and novels as whole works of art. Her authors range from Henry James to Iris Murdoch, her artists from Holbein to Botticelli, Manet to the present day. In her own novels, A.S. Byatt has often evoked the power of portraits. A feast for the eye and for the imagination, Portraits in Fiction is a remarkable and immensely enjoyable exploration of the marriage of two great genres.

On Histories and Stories

In her powerful opening essays - 'Fathers', 'Forefathers' and 'Ancestors' - A. S. Byatt considers the renaissance of the historical novel and discusses particularly the novel of wartime experience; the surprising variety of distant pasts that British writers have invented; and the new 'Darwinian novel'.

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 and Pat Barker.

She also offers fascinating insight into her own translation of historical fact into fiction in the two novellas which make up Angels and Insects.

Degrees of Freedom

First published in 1965, A.S. Byatt's Degrees of Freedom examined the first eight novels of Iris Murdoch, identifying freedom as a central theme in all of them, and looking at Murdoch's interest in the relations between art and goodness, master and slave, and the novel of character in the nineteenth century sense. Drawing on Iris Murdoch's own critical and philosphical writing, A.S. Byatt discussed her interest in the thought of Sartre, Plato, Freud and Simone Weil, and relates this to the form of the novels themselves.

Unruly Times

Unruly Times is a superlative portrait of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a fascinating exploration of the Romantic Movement and the dramatic events that shaped it. With a novelist's insight and eye for detail, A. S. Byatt brings alive this tumultuous period and shows a deep understanding of the effects upon the minds of Wordsworth, Coleridge and their contemporaries - de Quincey, Lamb, Hazlitt, Byron and Keats.

Possession a Readers Guide - by Catherine Burgass

This is part of a new series of guides to contemporary novels.

The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years from The Remains of the Day to White Teeth.

A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.

A.S. Byatt: Critical Storytelling by Alexa Alfer & Amy J. Edwards de Campos

This comprehensive study of A. S. Byatt's work spans virtually her entire career and offers insightful readings of all of Byatt's works of fiction. This book has broad appeal, including fellow researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students, plus general enthusiasts of Byatt's work.

Essays On the Fiction of A.S Byatt: Imagining the Real by Alexa Alfer & Michael J. Noble

Over recent years, the increasing scope of A. S. Byatt's work as a writer has fostered a corresponding breadth of academic interest both in the traditional field of literary criticism and beyond the discipline among scholars of the natural and social sciences. Most of this research has been limited to conference papers, interviews, and articles scattered across a wide variety of journals and has examined only the most basic critical issues related to Byatt's writing. This volume provides the first substantive inquiry into her fiction and spans virtually the entire body of her work.

Book Practices & Textual Itineraries. Introduction by Armelle Parey & Isabelle Roblin

Possession: A Romance is a novel that now holds an overwhelming position in literary criticism and in A. S. Byatt's bibliography. With the award of the Booker Prize in 1990, Byatt's writing career entered a new phase indeed, as Possession received praise from critics and readers as well as attention from academics. Although unique in Byatt’s oeuvre, Possession nevertheless contains distinct Byattian traits that can be found in the rest of her production, hence our choice to reexamine Possession twenty-five years on and to look at Byatt’s work through the prism of this particular novel. Most of the articles collected in this volume thus consider Possession on its own or in relation with earlier and later works of fiction.