A.S. Byatt and the “perpetual traveller”: a reading practice for new British fiction

Nicole Flynn

doi:10.18172/jes.3450

Autores/as

Nicole Flynn South Dakota State University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.3450

Palabras clave:

Ángeles e insectos, ficción histórica, novela, literatura británica, intertextualidad

Resumen

Aunque la mayoría de los lectores disfrutaron o por lo menos admiraron la novela “Possession”, escrita por A.S. Byatt, y merecedora del premio Booker, muchos se han quedado desconcertados por su obra de antes y después. Este artículo defiende que el problema no reside en las novelas en sí mismas, sino en la manera en que los lectores se acercan a las mismas. La lectura convencional que se suele llevar a cabo de la ficción postmoderna o experimental no le permite al lector entender y disfrutar de la obra densa y mareante de esta escritora. A través del análisis intertextual de su novela corta “Morpho Eugenia”, y en particular de dos textos imaginarios escritos por el protagonista, William Adamson, este artículo demuestra la manera en que la novela corta genera un tipo diferente de lectura. Siguiendo la metáfora de Byatt, en este artículo se recomienda que los lectores se conviertan en “viajeros perpetuos”, un modelo global de lectura que permitrá navegar no sólo por la obra de Byatt y el terreno de la ficción neo-victoriana, sino también por el campo de la nueva ficción británica y el populoso paisaje mediático en el que reside esta última.

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Biografía del autor/a

Nicole Flynn, South Dakota State University

Nicole Flynn is an Assistant Professor of English at South Dakota State University who specializes in twentieth century British Literature and theatre. She is the author of “Clockwork Women: Temporality and Form in Jean Rhys’s Interwar Novels,” in the anthology Rhys Matters: New Critical Perspectives (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), and “The Magazine-Programme and the Broadbrow Sophisticate: Britain’s Interwar Theatre Culture (forthcoming in Modernist Cultures).

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