Fairy-Tale Strategies Revisited: Constraints as Sources of Creativity and Ethical Reflection in A. S. Byatt’s Fairy Stories
By examining A. S. Byatt’s fairy stories included in the collection The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), this article reflects on the modes and motives of her reuse of the fairy tale genre. It is argued that, for Byatt, an important part of the fairy tale’s ethical strength is also crucially e...
Enregistré dans:
| Dans: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Auteur principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Anglais |
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Journal of the Short Story in English
2022
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| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | By examining A. S. Byatt’s fairy stories included in the collection The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), this article reflects on the modes and motives of her reuse of the fairy tale genre. It is argued that, for Byatt, an important part of the fairy tale’s ethical strength is also crucially embedded in its form because, due to their highly visible patterns of constraints operating at various levels (characterisation, language, plot development), fairy stories enact the condition of humans’ embeddedness in a reality that transcends them. In dialogue particularly with Iris Murdoch’s philosophy, this article problematises the limiting and yet creative function of constraints, suggesting that Byatt re-appropriates and manipulates the formal features distinctive of the fairy tale as limitations which, rather than subverted, offer a resistance to be negotiated and interacted with, often self-reflectively. Through reworking the traditional patterns of fairy tales, Byatt arguably intends to harness their narrative power rather than questioning it. Far from regarding fairy tales as a passive repository to be merely overcome, Byatt’s narrative operation endorses the genre’s view and fertile characteristics, as it comes uniquely equipped with sense-making and representation strategies able to capture certain unsolvable tensions of human existence. |
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