The Pressure of History in The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt
The Children’s Book is set in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain from 1895 to 1919. Self-consciously interweaving story and history, fact and fiction, fantasy and realism, it nonetheless departs from historiographic metafiction to reflect the new historical mood of post-millenial neo-historical fi...
Uloženo v:
| Vydáno v: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
|---|---|
| Hlavní autor: | |
| Médium: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Jazyk: | Anglais |
| Vydáno: |
Études britanniques contemporaines
2025
|
| Témata: | |
| On-line přístup: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Shrnutí: | The Children’s Book is set in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain from 1895 to 1919. Self-consciously interweaving story and history, fact and fiction, fantasy and realism, it nonetheless departs from historiographic metafiction to reflect the new historical mood of post-millenial neo-historical fiction. In its panoramic and impressively documented representation of the Edwardian period, it operates a return to the materiality of the past, signified in particular by the foregrounding of artefacts, described with exacting precision. The proliferation of historical fact, while establishing the legitimacy of the historical novel in narrating the past and producing historical meaning, may also be viewed as a token of the novel’s concern with the pressure of history. With the outbreak of the First World War, history exercises a form of predation on individual and collective fates but also takes its toll on the momentum of storytelling within the fictional world of the novel. |
|---|