A. S. Byatt, Possession (1990)

in Reinfandt, Christoph (Ed.) Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (2017)

A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession (1990) revolves around questions of writing the past, more particularly the Victorian past, from the perspective of the late twentieth century. As outlined in the essay ... [more ▼]

A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession (1990) revolves around questions of writing the past, more particularly the Victorian past, from the perspective of the late twentieth century. As outlined in the essay, Byatt’s novel stages various forms of possession, both material and immaterial, linking them to issues of identity and female autonomy as well as to epistemological and ethical notions of poetry and imagination. Possession is an ambivalent text in that it problematizes the ontological, epistemological and methodological problems of writing the past; at the same time, the novel asserts the desire to acquire knowledge of the past, exploring literary genres, poetry and imagination as various means of opening the past to the present. As a Neo-Victorian text, Possession re-evaluates perceived cliches about the Victorian age, rewriting it as an era of a benign humanism that counteracts late-twentieth-century doubts and insecurities. [less ▲]

Renate Brosch and Kylie Crane, eds. Visualising Australia: Images, Icons, Imaginations.

in Journal for the Study of British Cultures (2015), 22(2), 131-134

Dickens as an Agent of Change

Book published by AMS Press - 1 ed. (2015)

Precarious Selves in Contemporary British War Novels

in Korte, Barbara; Régard, Frédéric (Eds.) Narrating 'Precariousness': Modes, Media, Ethics (2014)

This essay takes its cue from Butler's notion of precariousness, delineated in her study Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). But while Butler is concerned with the events of 9/11 ... [more ▼]

This essay takes its cue from Butler's notion of precariousness, delineated in her study Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). But while Butler is concerned with the events of 9/11 as the US-American seminal catastrophe of the early twenty-first century, this essay focuses on fictional representations of WWI and WWII, the two wars which turned out to determine European and, indeed, World politics throughout the twentieth century. The novels discussed in this essay are examples of how fictional texts of both the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries are involved in critically (re)evaluating the British perspective on these two wars which can be described, each for its own particular cultural, political and ideological reasons, as having exposed the precariousness of human existence. Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy (1991-1995) is engaged in demythologizing WWI as a 'great' war. A.L. Kennedy’s Day (2007) is concerned with undermining the notion of WWII as a 'just' war the British fought in defence of civilization and humanity. Each novel problematizes the damaging effects which the inhumane conditions of industrial warfare have on human psychic stability. Both Barker's trilogy and Kennedy's novel feature protagonists whose traumatic war experiences have caused them to develop split personalities; and it is with the help of these characters' mental instabilities that the texts negotiate the precarious consequences entailed in a self's complete loss of control and power over one's own well-being. Next to discussing each author's particular representational strategy of narrating her protagonist's split into self and internal other, the essay also analyses the different ideological agendas underlying Barker's and Kennedy's texts. As the essay shows, both writers' protagonists strive to reconcile self and internal other in order to reaffirm their identities. But while Kennedy's Day is indebted to liberal humanism in its celebration of 'high' art and its supposed unifying effects on human Selfhood, Barker's novels suggest a reconciliation of traumatized self and internal other which is best analysed through the lens of Levinasian ethics. The Regeneration trilogy, the essay argues, privileges a concept of dual, if not multiple selfhood by representing healing as the ethical acceptance of difference, not its repression or expulsion. Thus, Barker's novels defy the violence which, according to Levinas, comes from subjecting the other to the self's understanding. [less ▲]

English News Plays of the Early 1620s: Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess and Ben Jon-son's The Staple of News.

in Davies, Simon; Fletcher, Puck (Eds.) News in Early Modern Europe: Currents and Connections. . Leiden: Brill, 2014. 215-229. (2014)

‘Eminent Victorians’ and Neo-Victorian Fictional Biography.

in Böhm-Schnitker, Nadine; Gruss, Susanne (Eds.) Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations (2014)

Taking her cue from the contemporary interest in both life-writing and Victorian individuals, Steveker focuses on the genre of neo-Victorian fictional biography. Providing close readings of Adam Foulds’s ... [more ▼]

Taking her cue from the contemporary interest in both life-writing and Victorian individuals, Steveker focuses on the genre of neo-Victorian fictional biography. Providing close readings of Adam Foulds’s The Quickening Maze (2009) and Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2009), Steveker argues that these two novels not only undermine clichéd perceptions of the ‘eminent Victorians’ whose lives they depict, but also question the idealised image of the Victorian age as a period of confident humanism and individual self-respect. Making two Victorian authors return as neo-Victorian fictional characters, Foulds’s and Flanagan’s novels exemplify the desire of repetition which is symptomatic of the neo-Victorian project. [less ▲]

Neue Welten neu entdeckt: Shakespeares Tempest

in Bogner, Ralph; Leber, Manfred (Eds.) Klassiker Neu-Lektüren (2013)

Ulrike Tancke. ‘Bethinke Thy Selfe’ in Early Modern England. Writing Women's Identities. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010

in English Studies (2013), 94(2), 240-241

‘My Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have’: A.S. Byatt's Female Artists.

in Pankratz, Anette; Puschmann-Nalenz, Barbara (Eds.) Portraits of the Artist as a Young Thing in British, Irish and Canadian Fiction after 1945 (2012)

Ruinous Fathers, Lethal Mothers: A Response to June Sturrock

in Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate (2012), 22(1), 157-161