On Histories and Stories

Selected Essays

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects General Interest Highlights Literary NOT Theory Literary Studies

by A. S. Byatt

Harvard University Press

Due/Published March 2002, pages, paper

ISBN 0674008332

New in paper (S02)

 As writers of English from Australia to India to Sri Lanka command our attention, Salman Rushdie can state confidently that English fiction was moribund until the Empire wrote back, and few, even among the British, demur. A. S. Byatt does, and her case is persuasive. In a series of essays on the complicated relations between reading, writing, and remembering, the gifted novelist and critic sorts the modish from the merely interesting and the truly good to arrive at a new view of British writing in our time. 

 Whether writing about the renaissance of the historical novel, discussing her own translation of historical fact into fiction, or exploring the recent European revival of interest in myth, folklore, and fairytale, Byatt's abiding concern here is with the interplay of fiction and history. Her essays amount to an eloquent and often moving meditation on the commitment to historical narrative and storytelling that she shares with many of her British and European contemporaries. With copious illustration and abundant insights into writers from Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green to Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, and Pat Barker, On Histories and Stories is an oblique defense of the art Byatt practices and a map of the complex affiliations of British and European narrative since 1945.

Review

As a student at Cambridge University A.S. Byatt studied the history of literary criticism and read Henry James, Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, and other famous writers on their craft. In post-graduate life Byatt has continued the tradition of writer/critic by becoming an English professor, literary critic, and a bestselling novelist. The essays from On Histories and Stories, taken from lectures at Yale and Emory and an article in the New York Times, concentrate on elements of fiction found in her own work: historical fiction and the literary tale. She opens with a discussion of the state of the historical novel in contemporary British literature and proceeds to examine the place of the fairy tale in European literature, exploring the works of Roberto Calasso, Karen Blixen, Italo Calvino, and others. She also makes several worthwhile detours along the way, including an essay on how the natural sciences and Darwinian ideas of evolution and time have influenced the themes and techniques of John Fowles and Penelope Fitzgerald. Reading through these essays one senses and shares Byatt’s excitement about other writers. Her discussions of noted contemporary writers (Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, W.G. Sebald, Anthony Burgess, and Muriel Spark) and overlooked twentieth century novelists is especially welcome as she stays true to her promise to “find new paradigms, which …bring new books, new styles, new preoccupations to the attention of readers.” (Hardcover, 2001 -- Paperback, 2002)

Also of interest: Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers by A.S. Byatt and Ignes Sodre

For more recent titles in Prose Criticism and Literary Theory