Soothsaying song thrushes and life-giving snails : motifs in A.S. Byatt's "Babel Tower" and "A whistling woman"
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.148Keywords:
A. S. Byatt, contemporary British fiction, song thrush and snails, intertextuality, fiction and scienceAbstract
Thrushes and snails are scattered throughout the pages of A .S. Byatt’s Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, functioning as motifs that link the main narrative with its intertexts, thematically and symbolically. Although the thrush appears to be a predatory creature, it links a line of soothsayers and helpers created by Byatt herself as well as others in the works of Robert Browning, J.R.R. Tolkien and Thomas Hardy. The snail is a complex figure, associated with myths of life and death as well as with scientific research into neuroscience, environmental studies and DNA, the basis for all life. As a result it serves to bridge the two cultures of the literary and scientific worlds in the second half of Byatt’s tetralogy.Downloads
References
Browning, Robert. 2000 (1845). “Home Thoughts from Abroad”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York. W. W. Norton & Company. 1358.
Byatt, A. S. 1967. The Game. London: Chatto & Windus.
Byatt, A. S. 1986 (1985). Still Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Byatt, A. S. 1993 (1991) Passions of the Mind. London: Vintage.
Byatt, A. S. 1995 (1987). “The Changeling”. Sugar & Other Stories. London: Vintage. 147-160.
Byatt, A. S. 1995 (1992). “Morpho Eugenia”. Angels and Insects. London: Vintage. 3-160.
Byatt, A. S. 1997 (1996). Babel Tower. London: Vintage.
Byatt, A. S. 1998 (1995). “A Lamia in the Cévennes”. Elementals, Stories of Fire and Ice. London: Vintage. 79-111.
Byatt, A. S. 2000. The Biographer’s Tale. London: Chatto & Windus.
Byatt, A. S. 2001 (2000). On Histories and Stories Selected Essays. London: Vintage.
Byatt, A. S. 2003 (2002). A Whistling Woman. London: Vintage.
Byatt. A. S. 2005. “Fiction informed by science”. Nature 434 (March): 294-297.
Byatt, A. S. 2009. The Children’s Book. London: Chatto and Windus.
Campbell, Jane. 2004. A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination. Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP.
Hardy, Thomas. (1900) The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York:
W. W. Norton & Company. 1937.
Kelly, Kathleen Coyne. 1996. A. S. Byatt. New York: Twayne Publishers.
Reynolds, Margaret and Jonathan Noakes. 2004. “Interview with A. S. Byatt”. A. S. Byatt The Essential Guide. London: Vintage. 11-32.
Schrager, Victor and A. S. Byatt. 2001. Bird Hand Book. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications.
Stone, Lawrence.1979 (1977). The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. Reading: Pelican Books.
Todd, Richard. 1997. A. S. Byatt. Plymouth, U.K.: Northcote House Publishers Ltd.
Tolkien, J. R. R. 1975 (1937). The Hobbit or There and Back Again. London: Unwin Paperbacks.
Wallhead, Celia. 1997. “The Un-Utopian Babelic Fallenness of Language: A. S. Byatt’s Babel Tower”. Dreams and Realities. Versions of Utopia in English Fiction from Dickens to Byatt. Annette Gomis van Hetteren and Miguel Martínez López, eds. Almería: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Almería. 1333-1350.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
The authors retain copyright of articles and authorize Journal of English Studies the first publication. They are free to share, redistribute, and/or reprint the article without obtaining permission from the publisher as long as they give appropriate credit to the editor and the journal.
Self-archiving is allowed too. In fact, it is recommendable to deposit a PDF version of the paper in academic and/or institutional repositories.
It is recommended to include the DOI number.
This journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
