Download or read book Wonder Tales in the Fiction of A S Byatt written by Alexandra Cheira and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-19 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides sustained critical attention on Byatt’s wonder tales, both the stand-alone tales and those which are embedded in the wider frame of a novel or novella. In this light, it examines Byatt’s claim that her wonder tales “are modern literary stories and they do play quite consciously with a postmodern creation and recreation of old forms” through a revisitation of the wonder tale in a productive dialogue with tradition as an expanded recognition of this fertile creative-critical dialogue with regards to the significance of the wonder tale in Byatt’s fictional work. The book evinces a fresh variety of conceptions and approaches to Byatt’s wonder tales, some spanning several tales and others focussing on a specific wonder tale, all thoroughly observant of the nature and workings of the relationship between story or novel and genre or tale, and theoretically informed by innovative critical approaches.
Download or read book Wonder Tales in the Fiction of A S Byatt written by Alexandra Cheira and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides sustained critical attention on Byatt's wonder tales, both the stand-alone tales and those which are embedded in the wider frame of a novel or novella. In this light, it examines Byatt's claim that her wonder tales "are modern literary stories and they do play quite consciously with a postmodern creation and recreation of old forms" through a revisitation of the wonder tale in a productive dialogue with tradition is an expanded recognition of this fertile creative-critical dialogue with regards to the significance of the wonder tale in Byatt's fictional work. The book evinces a fresh variety of conceptions and approaches to Byatt's wonder tales, some spanning several tales and others focussing on a specific wonder tale, all thoroughly observant of the nature and workings of the relationship between story or novel and genre or tale, and theoretically informed by innovative critical approaches.
Download or read book Wonder Tales written by Marina Warner and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marina Warner has gathered together a magical collection of fairy tales by the great women storytellers of the 17th and 18th centuries. These are passionate, extraordinary, and occasionally proto-feminist retellings of classic fairy stories by women who ingeniously used the fairy tale genre to comment on their own times and experiences. The stories are all in superb new translations by celebrated writers, including A. S. Byatt, Gilbert Adair and John Ashbery. With a brilliant intorduction by Marina Warner, recognised as one of our greatest experts on myth and fairy tale.
Download or read book Little Black Book of Stories written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unforgettable collection of fairy tales for grownups—from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession. • “A delight.... provoking and alarming, richly yet tautly rendered.... [She] has the sheer narrative skill to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and make your pulse race.” —The New York Times Book Review Like Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Isak Dinesen and Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt knows that fairy tales are for adults. And in this ravishing collection she breathes new life into the form. Little Black Book of Stories offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women, childhood friends reunited by chance, venture into a dark forest where once, many years before, they saw–or thought they saw–something unspeakable. Another woman, recently bereaved, finds herself slowly but surely turning into stone. A coolly rational ob-gyn has his world pushed off-axis by a waiflike art student with her own ideas about the uses of the body. Spellbinding, witty, lovely, terrifying, the Little Black Book of Stories is Byatt at the height of her craft.
Download or read book The Children s Book written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-11-03 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the renowned author of Possession, The Children’s Book is the absorbing story of the close of what has been called the Edwardian summer: the deceptively languid, blissful period that ended with the cataclysmic destruction of World War I. In this compelling novel, A.S. Byatt summons up a whole era, revealing that beneath its golden surface lay tensions that would explode into war, revolution and unbelievable change — for the generation that came of age before 1914 and, most of all, for their children. The novel centres around Olive Wellwood, a fairy tale writer, and her circle, which includes the brilliant, erratic craftsman Benedict Fludd and his apprentice Phillip Warren, a runaway from the poverty of the Potteries; Prosper Cain, the soldier who directs what will become the Victoria and Albert Museum; Olive’s brother-in-law Basil Wellwood, an officer of the Bank of England; and many others from every layer of society. A.S. Byatt traces their lives in intimate detail and moves between generations, following the children who must choose whether to follow the roles expected of them or stand up to their parents’ “porcelain socialism.” Olive’s daughter Dorothy wishes to become a doctor, while her other daughter, Hedda, wants to fight for votes for women. Her son Tom, sent to an upper-class school, wants nothing more than to spend time in the woods, tracking birds and foxes. Her nephew Charles becomes embroiled with German-influenced revolutionaries. Their portraits connect the political issues at the heart of nascent feminism and socialism with grave personal dilemmas, interlacing until The Children’s Book becomes a perfect depiction of an entire world. Olive is a fairy tale writer in the era of Peter Pan and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In the Willows, not long after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. At a time when children in England suffered deprivation by the millions, the concept of childhood was being refined and elaborated in ways that still influence us today. For each of her children, Olive writes a special, private book, bound in a different colour and placed on a shelf; when these same children are ferried off into the unremitting destruction of the Great War, the reader is left to wonder who the real children in this novel are. The Children’s Book is an astonishing novel. It is an historical feat that brings to life an era that helped shape our own as well as a gripping, personal novel about parents and children, life’s most painful struggles and its richest pleasures. No other writer could have imagined it or created it.
Download or read book The Djinn in the Nightingale s Eye written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-10-21 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The magnificent title story of this collection of fairy tales for adults describes the strange and uncanny relationship between its extravagantly intelligent heroine--a world renowned scholar of the art of story-telling--and the marvelous being that lives in a mysterious bottle, found in a dusty shop in an Istanbul bazaar. As A.S. Byatt renders this relationship with a powerful combination of erudition and passion, she makes the interaction of the natural and the supernatural seem not only convincing, but inevitable. The companion stories in this collection each display different facets of Byatt's remarkable gift for enchantment. They range from fables of sexual obsession to allegories of political tragedy; they draw us into narratives that are as mesmerizing as dreams and as bracing as philosophical meditations; and they all us to inhabit an imaginative universe astonishing in the precision of its detail, its intellectual consistency, and its splendor. "A dreamy treat.... It is not merely strange, it is wondrous." --Boston Globe "Alternatingly erudite and earthy, direct and playful.... If Scheherazade ever needs a break, Byatt can step in, indefinitely." --Chicago Tribune "Byatt's writing is crystalline and splendidly imaginative.... These [are] perfectly formed tales." --Washington Post Book World
Download or read book The Fiction of A S Byatt written by Louisa Hadley and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Guide examines the key critical responses to Byatt's fiction (both her novels and short stories) tracing the wider debates about realism, postmodernism and feminism with which they engage. The Guide also explores the themes which are central to Byatt's work, such as her depiction of writer-figures and her conception of artistic vision.
Download or read book A S Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination written by Jane Campbell and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2004-05-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contemporary writer Byatt uses the term heliotropic in two ways. First, it refers to her exploration and development of her own relation to the sun and to how her women characters experience adventures of the mind and feelings that bring them into the sun's light. Second, it refers to the fact that she suffers from seasonal affective disorder, and
Download or read book Uncanny Fairy Tales written by Francesca Arnavas and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are fairy tales that surprise, destabilise, or even shock us: these are uncanny fairy tales that manipulate familiar stories in creative and bewildering ways in order to express new meanings. This work analyses these tales, basing its approach on a reformulation of Freud’s concept of the uncanny. Through a cognitive outlook the employed theoretical framework provides new perspectives on the study of experimental literary fairy tales. Considering English-language literature, complex and unsettling reinterpretations of the fairy-tale discourse began to appear during the Victorian Age, later resurfacing as a postmodern trend. This research individuates uncanny-related narrative techniques and cognitive responses as means to decodify and explore these tales, and as ways to discover unseen connections between Victorian and postmodern texts. The new theorisation of the uncanny is linked with three subconcepts: mirror, hybridity, and wonder, which function as tools to describe and investigate the cognitive and emotional entanglements characterising enigmatic and disorienting fairy tales.
Download or read book Sugar and Other Stories written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-04-25 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected in a single volume for the first time—an unforgettable book of short stories from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession that explores the fragile ties between generations, the dizzying abyss of loss, and the elaborate memories we construct against it. In this book of short fictions, A.S. Byatt compels us to inhabit other lives and returns us to our own with new knowledge, compassion, and a sense of wonder. "Byatt's stories display all her talents as a novelist, but spiced with an additional friskiness." —Evening Standard
Download or read book Medusa s Ankles written by A. S. Byatt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ravishing, luminous selection of short stories from the prize-winning imagination of A. S. Byatt, "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights" (The New York Times Book Review). With an introduction by David Mitchell, best-selling author of Cloud Atlas Mirrors shatter at the hairdresser's when a middle-aged client explodes in rage. Snow dusts the warm body of a princess, honing it into something sharp and frosted. Summer sunshine flickers on the face of a smiling child who may or may not be real. Medusa's Ankles celebrates the very best of A. S. Byatt's short fiction, carefully selected from a lifetime of writing. Peopled by artists, poets, and fabulous creatures, the stories blaze with creativity and color. From ancient myth to a British candy factory, from a Chinese restaurant to a Mediterranean swimming pool, from a Turkish bazaar to a fairy-tale palace, Byatt transports her readers beyond the veneer of the ordinary—even beyond the gloss of the fantastical—to places rich and strange and wholly unforgettable.
Download or read book Fairy Tales Reimagined written by Susan Redington Bobby and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although readers and filmgoers are strongly familiar with Disney's sanitized child-centric fairy tales, they are quick to catch on to reworkings of classic tales into a contemporary context. The rise is such retellings seems to indicate that readers are hungry for a new narrative, one that hearkens back to the old yet moves the storyline forward to reflect conditions of the modern world. No mere escapist fantasies, the reimagined fairy tales of the late 20th and early 21st centuries reflect social, political and cultural truths. Sixteen essays consider fairy tales recreated through short stories, novels, poetry, and the graphic novel from both best-selling and lesser-known writers, applying a variety of perspectives, including postmodernism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, queer theory and gender studies. Along with the classic fairy tales, fiction from writers such as Neil Gaiman (Stardust) and Gregory Macquire (Wicked) is covered.
Download or read book Brothers Beasts written by Kate Bernheimer and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaks new ground in fairy-tale studies by offering male writers a chance to reflect on their relationships to fairy tales.
Download or read book The Annotated Brothers Grimm written by Jacob Grimm and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2004 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing 40 stories in new translations by Tatar this celebration of the richness and dramatic power of the legendary fables also features 150 illustrations, many of them in color, by legendary painters.
Download or read book A S Byatt written by Celia M. Wallhead and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A.S. Byatt has always alternated novels with shorter fiction. Different literary and linguistic models are applied here to analyse how she guides her readers' understanding of vital, complex issues within her perennial themes of life, creativity and death. This study focuses on certain stories from the six volumes of short fiction she has produced to date. The two novellas of Angels and Insects are scrutinised for their intertextuality, while stories from Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice and Little Black Book of Stories are novel discussions of creativity and related gender issues.
Download or read book Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A S Byatt s Possession and in Mythology written by Gillian M. E. Alban and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2003 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gillian Alban meticulously pursues the Fairy Melusine snake-woman image through the plot and the poetry of A. S. Byatt's novel Possession, into medieval legend, and beyond into her antecedents in ancient myth. The book describes the erotically inspiring force of Melusine's love story and draws parallels with goddesses such as Lamia, Ishtar or Inanna, Isis, and Asherah. Mother, creator, and leader, the figure of Melusine was ultimately vilified and tellingly converted into the demon of patriarchal accounts, as seen in the examples of Lilith, Medusa, Scylla, and the serpent in the Garden. Alban deconstructs part of Genesis, including the roles of Adam and Eve and Cain's crime, and illuminates the Old Testament worship of the goddess Asherah alongside the male Yahweh. A forceful exploration of literature, history, and myth, this study sweeps away limiting assumptions about the female sex. Melusine the Serpent Goddess restores the dignity acknowledged to women of old, making a forceful statement about the power and creativity of women.
Download or read book Concerning Evil written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. The chapters within this volume expose a need to discuss and challenge both the practise of evil and the judgement of acts and persons as being ‘evil.’ The reader will find a diverse and intriguing selection of representative texts and themes, including: discussions of the monstrous, the consideration of evil objects, a reading of the wicked language of lying and ‘bullshitting’, and investigations of madness. A range of literature from medieval to contemporary texts, including poetry, novels, television and cinema, are considered and analysed through cultural and historical contexts in the hopes to extend the discussion that intrigues many of us: what is evil?
