Barbara Franchi | Durham University (original) (raw)
Journal Articles by Barbara Franchi
![Research paper thumbnail of Material and Geographical Intertextualities in [A. S. Byatt's] Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/105722435/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Journal of the Short Story in English, 2021
In A. S. Byatt’s Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998), natural elements enmesh with opposit... more In A. S. Byatt’s Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998), natural elements enmesh with opposite colours, geography, texts, artworks, and the human experiences they generate. With the first three stories preoccupied with intercultural encounters, Elementals defines individual identities at the crossroads between this very entanglement and its material effects on the characters interacting with them. Combining intertextuality with new materialist approaches, this article argues that Byatt’s protagonists need to travel south and immerse themselves in a strange culture in order to articulate their sense of belonging within, or without, their country of origin. Indeed, echoes of canonical European texts such as Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra in “Crocodile Tears,” Baudelaire’s and Keats’s poems in “A Lamia in the Cévennes,” and Andersen’s fairy tales in “Cold” are in dialogue with stones, water and fire/ice to shape the stories’ north-south trajectories. For the highly perceptive and artistically inclined protagonists of these stories—an art collector, a painter, a scientist-princess—such interlinkages between texts, art and materials are not merely experiences of passive consumption, but life-defining encounters with matter qua matter. Intertextuality expands towards “transposition” (Braidotti) and “transcorporeality” (Alaimo), encompassing spatial and bodily dimensions into the intercultural dialogue enabled by interactions with texts. A crucial aspect of such material intertextuality is rendered by the tropes of snake women, stone women and icewomen. By embodying mythical legacies of the female experiences of love, childbirth, ageing and loss in the flesh, Patricia Nimmo in “Crocodile Tears” and Fiammarosa in “Cold” experience estrangement in the very south they initially chose to escape domestic reality. Only a return home (“Crocodile Tears”), or an elemental compromise between the cold of ice and heat of the desert (“Cold”) offers them the solace they need to escape the cyclicality of the female body. Bernard Lycett-Kean in “Lamia,” conversely, encounters the paradigm of chimeric femininity not in his own, but in the titular Lamia’s body, who becomes his muse and platonic love interest. By refusing to engage in sexual encounters with her, he retains the freedom that women are denied and is able to fully embrace his adoptive French home precisely because he experiences it through the prism of material art alone. Ultimately, the move from the familiar north to the, at times alienating, at times welcoming, south opens intertextual crossovers towards material elements and embodiment. Such potentialities are, nonetheless, defined by strictly coded gender norms.
MediAzioni: Rivista Online di studi interdisciplinari su lingue e culture, 2019
This article examines the role of nationalist rhetoric, post-imperial nostalgia and individual fo... more This article examines the role of nationalist rhetoric, post-imperial nostalgia and individual formation in David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006). Indeed, the coming-of-age story of thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor centres around his dealing with the local, mundane reverberations of events which have global resonance. What are the roles of the historical context of the Falklands War, the 1981 British Nationality Act and Thatcher’s Britain in shaping Jason’s formation? How do representations of nationalism and imperial nostalgia define young masculine identities in a 1980s rural English community? How do acts of resistance address the local implications of global conditions of insecurity and instability?
By considering the impactful presence of the Falklands War in a lower-middle-class village in the English Midlands and mapping them onto a young person’s narrative of development, I analyse how ideals of imperial masculinity determine the protagonist’s process of growth and sociability. In particular, I argue that the intersection between 1980s attitudes around family, traditional gender roles and patriotism, and imperialistic discourses on race promoted by Margaret Thatcher’s policies and style of communication, is a key locus of tension within the novel’s story of formation. Jason’s engagement with imperial models of masculinity is ambiguous: while driven by a desire to belong and also to grow up, Mitchell’s hero refuses to fully embrace a traditional and violent masculinity and is able instead to promote a different type of identity, one where he is at home in the world of dialogue and cross-cultural encounters. Ultimately, in this historical fiction Jason’s ambivalent stance towards the conservative attitude prevalent in his community endows him with a mobile identity, one in which his critical thinking represent a non-hegemonic, anti-imperial form of collective memory.
Neo-Victorian Studies, 2019
In neo-Victorian gold-rush novels, the Pacific coasts of California and New Zealand are liminal s... more In neo-Victorian gold-rush novels, the Pacific coasts of California and New Zealand are liminal spaces where clashes and encounters between Asian, Australasian and American cultures occur. In particular, frontier town communities in Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003) and Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune (1999) portray the problematic hierarchy established by the white, predominantly male ruling class over Chinese migrants. Pao Yi (in Tremain) and Tao Chi’en (in Allende), victims of the traumatic experience of the Opium Wars and the loss of their families, are reduced to a marginal role in the settlement enterprise, and subjected to violent discrimination from the white prospectors. They will find unexpected allies in another silenced minority in the frontier town, namely women of English heritage. This article argues that the friendships and romantic relations, which eventually develop between these two groups of excluded people, challenge imperial hegemony from within. Such Anglo-Chinese crossings disrupt the Victorian system of social and racial hierarchies, and represent a new postcolonial and neo-Victorian community based on cross-cultural integration and equality.
Partial Answers: the Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2018
How do women travelling the colonial frontier create a feminine, and potentially less hierarchica... more How do women travelling the colonial frontier create a feminine, and potentially less hierarchical type of modernity? And how does Neo-Victorian fiction explore gendered and racialized types of modernity through the use of travel? Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013) represesnts the quest for a postcolonial and feminine modernity through the trope of the woman traveler, worker, storyteller and entrepreneur. In particular, protagonists Anna Whetherell and Lydia Wells oppose the highly racist and sexist societies of gold rush frontier towns of the 1860s New Zealand through solitary travel on foot, by sea and across textual layers. This paper argues that such independent solitary women travelers stand for a new representation of white women in colonial contexts and challenge traditional categories of Victorian femininity, such as the dichotomous opposition between the Angel in the House and the fallen woman. By shifting across white femininity and queer Chinese identities (in Anna’s case), and by embracing a masculine, capitalist model (for Lydia), Catton’s heroines survive, on their own, as members of a minority in the communities of white, male miners. The two women thus embody new types of femininity and, while placing themselves outside the colonial hierarchy, they question the social structure, the exploitation of the Other (the woman, the Chinese) and set an example for a more viable and more equal society born out of colonial settlement. Finally, while shaping modernity through their female gaze and a free way of travelling the peripheries, the two women also accomplish their own Bildung process and, forgers of their own fortunes, symbolize the shift from masculine, imperial modernity to a feminine, neo-Victorian, postcolonial paradigm.
Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, Dec 2014
Book Chapters by Barbara Franchi
Wonder Tales in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt, edited by Alexandra Cheira, 2023
A modern rendition of the Arabian Nights’ vortex of embedded stories, intertwining Middle Eastern... more A modern rendition of the Arabian Nights’ vortex of embedded stories, intertwining Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and Anglophone traditions, A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ (1994) is a veritable treasure chest of narrative voices, intertextualities, and the magic of storytelling. Read as either ‘a feminist narratology’ (Campbell: 190) or an orientalist exploration of how a western female traveller fares in an exoticized east (Renk: 115), this postmodern novella intersects the power of stories with the material contingencies of embodied experiences.
Indeed, Byatt’s protagonist Gillian, a female narratologist championing western second-wave feminism while experiencing the qualms of ageing, is juxtaposed to the more-than-human djinn: sharing stories becomes not only a regenerative act of mutual support and a tool in the inevitable romance, but also a strategy to question hierarchies between male and female, east and west, layered, infinite temporalities of supernatural life with the finite, determined scope of human life.
Mixing the metatextual concerns that characterise Byatt’s oeuvre as a whole with a preoccupation with non-human forms of agency which emerges most prolifically in the writer’s later works, I argue here that the magical tropes of glass, water, and – more ambivalently- stone, become key transcorporeal entanglements where the human and the non-human intersect, opening the possibilities of shared, infinite narratives. Enmeshed in a tripartite system of chronological frameworks (linear, circular and layered), the novella balances a focus on the politics of its here and now, the 1990s, with the expanded temporality of the overlapping narratives, becoming storied matter, and bridging the boundary between narrative and embodied materiality, between word and world.
Neo-Victorian Decadences, ed. by Kostas Boyiopoulos and Joseph Thorne, 2022
This chapter analyses the relationship between artists’ lives, artworks and ekphrasis in A. S. By... more This chapter analyses the relationship between artists’ lives, artworks and ekphrasis in A. S. Byatt’s neo-Victorian novel The Children’s Book (2009) and the neo-Decadent joint biography of William Morris and Mariano Fortuny, Peacock and Vine (2016). By taking into account verbal representations that bring art objects to life, I argue that Byatt engages in an act that indulges in neo-Victorian aesthetic pleasure, while also operating a reassessment of Decadent art.
How is the relationship between artists and artworks articulated in these two volumes? What are the roles of the narrator and the reader, as external viewers and as active players in the conjunction between verbal and visual representations? On the one hand, The Children’s Book traces, among its several narrative lines, the story of an artist from his humble origins to success through his numerous sources of inspiration and deploys ekphrastic strategies as narrative drives that define characters’ existences and their creative output.
On the other hand, with Peacock and Vine Byatt takes ekphrasis to a new, metatextual level: she inserts herself within the works of art exhibited at the Fortuny Museum and claims a place for herself within contemporary redefinitions of the designer’s artistic production. This choice has also significance within the neo-Victorian strategies that Peacock and Vine engages in. By physically entering the artistic space, Byatt – with her actual body and her admiration for the artist’s work – makes her twenty-first-century engagement with Decadent art visible, and proposes writing a new neo-Victorian aesthetic that redefines the relationship between art-makers and art-consumers by challenging the boundaries between artists, writers and artworks.
A novel about home, travel, drugs and other forms of addiction, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1... more A novel about home, travel, drugs and other forms of addiction, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) is a narrative of subversion in several respects: while securing its author’s central position in the Victorian sensational canon, it inaugurates the modern detective story with its melodramatic elements. Considered ‘the first and greatest of English detective novels’, The Moonstone takes the Gothic canon, and social critique typical of the Victorian realist novel, to modernity: set between 1799 and the 1840s, it crosses England and its global imperial networks, while questioning the connections between such different spaces. In particular, Collins’s is a novel about Empire, where forms of mobility between goods, people, citizens, colonial subjects, created by the imperial enterprise, become crucial narrative drives. The ways in which travel occurs across landscapes, households, cities, sacred temples and battlefields in England and India shape the novel’s geographies, in that they effectively establish a system of connections and oppositions between here and there, home and abroad, self and Other, that underlies and eventually solves the sensational plot.
A. S. Byatt, before and after Possession: recent critical approaches, 2017
ABSTRACT: In Byatt’s neo-Victorian fiction, mothers who write are a dangerous category of artists... more ABSTRACT: In Byatt’s neo-Victorian fiction, mothers who write are a dangerous category of artists: motherhood becomes a burden for women with artistic ambitions and estranges them from their children. Why do a mother’s writings become fatal to herself and her offspring? When and why does maternity become incompatible with writing? How are families reshaped within the dangerous relationship between mothers, their children and their writing?
As the powers of writing overlap with, and often swallow up women’s responsibilities for blood relations, Christabel LaMotte (in Possession, A Romance) and Olive Wellwood (in The Children’s Book) redefine nineteenth-century family structures and claim a space of their own, where literature is both a punishment and a replacement for their biological offspring.
Conversely, it will be LaMotte’s and Wellwood’s children who address their mothers’ traumas: whether through tragic, irretrievable decisions, or through the discovery of alternate paths towards creativity, the disruptive forces of the mothers’ work is defied by the very generation that has most been affected by detrimental writings.
The sea is an ocean of intertextual relations in A. S. Byatt’s fiction: in her neo-Victorian dipt... more The sea is an ocean of intertextual relations in A. S. Byatt’s fiction: in her neo-Victorian diptych Angels and Insects and the postmodern novel The Biographer’s Tale, Victorian maritime travel is juxtaposed to the seas of literature and creative relations across worlds and texts. This chapter examines how, through the deployment of intertextual strategies, Byatt’s sea narratives juxtapose the imperial seas of the north to the postcolonial crossings of civilizations in the Mediterranean and the South of the Atlantic. Franchi argues that the colonial seas are rewritten into a postcolonial and postmodern sea of words, through the recurrence of the myth of Ulysses and the powerfully transformative image of the maelstrom.
Books by Barbara Franchi
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018
How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple form... more How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple forms of Victorian travel literature, such as fiction, travel accounts, newspapers, and poetry, shape perceptions of imperial and national spaces, in the British context and beyond? This collection examines how, in the Victorian era, space and empire were shaped around the notion of boundaries, by travel narratives and practices, and from a variety of methodological and critical perspectives. From the travel writings of artists and polymaths such as Carmen Sylva and Richard Burton, to a reassessment of Rudyard Kipling’s, H. G. Wells’s and Julia Pardoe’s cross-cultural and cross-gender travels, this collection assesses a broad range of canonical and lesser-studied Victorian travel texts and genres, and evaluates the representation of empires, nations, and individual identity in travel accounts covering Europe, Asia, Africa and Britain.
Talks by Barbara Franchi
I had the pleasure of speaking to Emma Catan on her wonderful podcast, Victorian Legacies recentl... more I had the pleasure of speaking to Emma Catan on her wonderful podcast, Victorian Legacies recently. We discussed old and new research ideas, the politics of adaptation especially in terms of race and nostalgia, and how to expand the neo-Victorian canon.
I am delighted to invite you all to a forthcoming event devoted to the work of Abdulrazak Gurnah:... more I am delighted to invite you all to a forthcoming event devoted to the work of Abdulrazak Gurnah: “Colonial Traces, Exile, and the 2021 Nobel Prize”. The event will focus on Gurnah’s fiction in the context of the history of colonialism in Africa, migration and refugee writing. It will take place on Tuesday, May 10, from 2.30 to 5 PM, in Hallgarth House Seminar Room, and via Zoom.
Gurnah himself has graciously agreed to pre-record a short Q&A with our guest speakers, Dr Florian Stadtler (Bristol University) and Dr Lucinda Newns (Anglia Ruskin University). The recording will be screened on the day and will be followed by Dr Stadtler’s and Dr Newns’ position papers and a reading group discussion on Gurnah’s latest novel, Afterlives (2020).
The purpose of the afternoon is to encourage as much discussion as possible, so please feel free to invite your PGRs and/or MA students as well. You may want to join for the whole event, or for only parts of it if you are unable to stay for the whole duration. If you’d like to mingle a bit earlier and grab a cup of tea or coffee, please note that the room is booked from 2 pm onwards.
If you would like to attend, in person or on Zoom, please sign up on the relevant Eventbrite links.
In Sarah Moss’s novels, the boundaries between nature and culture, between geological, biological... more In Sarah Moss’s novels, the boundaries between nature and culture, between geological, biological and historical memory intersect and overlap. Her novels are mostly located in rural landscapes where living conditions are extreme, such as holiday campsites with neither electricity nor phone signal, remote islands off the northern Scottish coast, or a re-enactment of pre-Roman life around Hadrian’s Wall. Here, make-shift, small, human communities are shaped by the weather, the tides, the soil, the flora and fauna, while troubling desires and fears manifest themselves more freely than in the social conventions of city life. The uncanny becomes an everyday presence in such human-environment interactions, so much so that literal ghosts from the past reappear to haunt Moss’s contemporary protagonists. In this respect, Ghost Wall (2018) and Summerwater (2020) explore the dangers of British nationalist tendencies in light of Brexit, while Night Waking focuses on how the ghosts of a family’s past embody collective traumas of cultural imperialism. Starting from the bog people in Ghost Wall which literally re-emerge from the earth and the skeleton of a baby found in the garden in Night Waking (2011), this lecture will explore how the memory of the land shapes collective and historical memory. It will examine, in particular, how Moss unearths contemporary xenophobia as a direct legacy of the traumas of Empire. British national identity and its English variation, therefore, are contentious spaces where past ideologies generate contemporary monsters, but where the natural environment can also act as an even more ancestral antidote.
Keynote lecture for: On Potentialities, 6 th ASYRAS Conference. This paper argues that neo-Victo... more Keynote lecture for: On Potentialities, 6 th ASYRAS Conference.
This paper argues that neo-Victorian fiction about empire draws a fruitful parallel between subaltern subjects and non-human forms of life, in order to establish a counter-colonial strategy and create a narrative of ecocritical potentiality. To what extent are non-human forms of life and subaltern subjects given an agency of their own in novels that look the legacy of political, economic and cultural imperialism through its impact on the natural environment? How do these subjectivities translate their lack of agency into a counternarrative of potential to (not-)be and resistance?
If, indeed, the ‘interlacing of politics and life’ (Agamben, Homo Sacer 1998: 120) generates the power structures that define hierarchies in human societies, it equally shapes the separation between fulfilled lives (bios) and lives reduced to their bare essence (zoē). In the context of imperialism, the divisions effected by power are entirely the product of human ambition and hubris; nonetheless, as Rosi Braidotti highlights, they have significant consequences on the ‘human-non-human linkages’ (‘A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities’, 2018: 5) that are involved in these human enterprises.
Such an interconnection is central in Amitav Ghosh’s work; in both the essay The Great Derangement (2016) and the Ibis Trilogy he demonstrates that the causes of the current climate crisis lie in the history of European colonialism and ensuing globalisation. Indeed, in the first two novels of the series, Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011), the opium trade in China that preludes to the first opium war determines the use of resources and the reduction, by the English colonisers and Western traders, of Indian and Chinese individuals and communities to subaltern subjects. Similarly, in Byatt’s ‘Morpho Eugenia’ (from Angels and Insects, 1991) and The Biographer’s Tale (2000), Victorian explorations in the Amazon forest and the process of classifying insects are depicted both as an imperial strategy of ownership and control over exploitable lands, but also as an attempt to justify the establishment of the structural separation between ethnic groups, and between different living species.
By analysing the connection between the opium culture and trade, indenture and plant-hunting in Ghosh, and the ways in which modern entomology produces the destruction of forest habitats and human’s animalistic instincts in Byatt, I argue that the two writers stage such hierarchical separations precisely to expose the detrimental effects of imperial exploitation on human communities, polities and the natural environment. Ultimately, Ghosh and Byatt shape their narratives around a world that is ‘neither anthropocentric nor anthropomorphic, but rather geo-political, eco-sophical and proudly zoē-centred’ (Braidotti, The Posthuman 2013: 194). By shifting the paradigm from an anthropocentric approach towards anti-imperial strategies, these texts offer ecocritical potential and establish agency enabled by the interconnectedness of all forms of life on earth.
Special Issues by Barbara Franchi
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas
Feminism is one of the most contentious terms in current discourse, being continually invoked, re... more Feminism is one of the most contentious terms in current discourse, being continually invoked, rejected, dismissed, and appropriated by a number of subjects, in the academic, the political and the social activism spheres.
This special issue was spurred by a desire to reduce the gap between feminist theory and practice, and to create conversations across a diversity of disciplines and perspectives. From social psychology to media studies, postcolonial literature and the intersection between visual arts and politics, the contributions of this issue offer a broad range of approaches to crucial questions in 21st century feminisms: what is the role of women’s participation in political protests? What are the models of female representation in popular culture and the arts? To what extent do the personal and the political intersect in contemporary societies? How are diverse feminist agendas pursued, in current feminist activism and in the academia?
We hope that this issue will appeal not only to the scholars of feminism from across such fields as literature, art and cultural studies, as well as the social sciences, social geography, religious studies and history, but also to the activist, the blogger, the journalist – anyone genuinely interested in the significance and variety of feminisms today.
Conference Papers by Barbara Franchi
ESSE 2021 Conference Paper, 2021
How does the human experience generate posthuman forms of existence, and how do human, non-human ... more How does the human experience generate posthuman forms of existence, and how do human, non-human and posthuman coexist? When does the intra-action between human behaviour,
In Sarah Moss’s historical novel Bodies of Light (2014), young nurse May Moberley dies mysterious... more In Sarah Moss’s historical novel Bodies of Light (2014), young nurse May Moberley dies mysteriously in a storm in 1878 while trying to return to mainland Scotland from the (fictional) island of Colsay, where she had tried to work towards reducing child mortality. In Night Waking (2011), the novel’s contemporary sequel, historian Anna Bennet uncovers the story behind May’s disappearance by finding her letters and a child’s skeleton in her summer house. The Victorian woman’s traces disrupt Anna’s complicated domesticity, made of juggling childcare with nightly academic work; at the same time, they become a haunting presence enabling her to redefine her relationship to the island, her body, and her work as a historian.
How do rural islands allow hidden histories to resurface in the present? What is the relationship between the traumas of Victorian (lost) motherhood and millennial feminist attempts to successfully combine motherhood with an intellectual career? And how do Gothic shores become textual palimpsests, where historical traces engender the conjuring and creation of new stories?
In this paper, I argue that Moss’s Colsay embodies layers of ‘unofficial history’ (Timothy Baker, Contemporary Scottish Gothic: 90) and establishes uncanny connections across centuries, shaping female body politics, cultural perceptions of maternity, and women’s ability to write their own histories. While a tragedy affecting a Victorian rural community haunts twenty-first-century Anna’s family struggles, it nonetheless enables her to take agency over her life and career. The body of the dead child, a Gothic memento mori of dire living conditions in the past, represents therefore the birth of Anna’s new intellectual life as a feminist historian, allowing her to inscribe the history of her life within the haunting traces left by her foremothers.
In Autumn 2016, upon receiving Erasmus Prize in Amsterdam, A. S. Byatt thanked ‘the European nove... more In Autumn 2016, upon receiving Erasmus Prize in Amsterdam, A. S. Byatt thanked ‘the European novel’ (Interview with Phillips) for having shaped her writing throughout her career. Indeed, from her intertextual references to Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco in the structure of Possession: A Romance (1990) to her rewriting of Old Norse sagas in Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011), Byatt’s oeuvre engages in a constant dialogue with the ‘mythical thread running through contemporary European fiction’ (Franken, A.S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity xiv).
How do such literary crossings respond to ideas on national identity and cultural? How can literature represent the relation between national and European identities, at a time when this very coexistence is questioned by Brexit? In this paper, I analyse how The Children’s Book (2009) and Ragnarok: The End of the Gods deploy children’s literature to define a European cultural memory that transcends borders. In particular, by depicting the viewpoint of young soldiers posted to the front of the First World War (in The Children’s Book) and a little girl experiencing the traumas of the Second World War (in Ragnarok), Byatt shows how reading and writing stories forms one’s identity, as part of a nation and as part of a wider, continental community. Equally, I argue how in Peacock and Vine (2016), her biography of William Morris and Mariano Fortuny, Byatt traces a European common ground residing in artistic, intertextual and textile crossovers. Morris’s and Fortuny’s ability to integrate international influences in their work allowed them to redefine Victorian and fin-de-siècle material culture through a pan-European perspective.
At a time of tension, uncertainty and doubt as to Britain’s position within/out the European project, Byatt’s writings crucially highlight how the arts have contributed, across the centuries, to constructing a shared, European cultural memory which found in international crosspollinations and intersections its very reason to exist and resist.
Journal of the Short Story in English, 2021
In A. S. Byatt’s Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998), natural elements enmesh with opposit... more In A. S. Byatt’s Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998), natural elements enmesh with opposite colours, geography, texts, artworks, and the human experiences they generate. With the first three stories preoccupied with intercultural encounters, Elementals defines individual identities at the crossroads between this very entanglement and its material effects on the characters interacting with them. Combining intertextuality with new materialist approaches, this article argues that Byatt’s protagonists need to travel south and immerse themselves in a strange culture in order to articulate their sense of belonging within, or without, their country of origin. Indeed, echoes of canonical European texts such as Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra in “Crocodile Tears,” Baudelaire’s and Keats’s poems in “A Lamia in the Cévennes,” and Andersen’s fairy tales in “Cold” are in dialogue with stones, water and fire/ice to shape the stories’ north-south trajectories. For the highly perceptive and artistically inclined protagonists of these stories—an art collector, a painter, a scientist-princess—such interlinkages between texts, art and materials are not merely experiences of passive consumption, but life-defining encounters with matter qua matter. Intertextuality expands towards “transposition” (Braidotti) and “transcorporeality” (Alaimo), encompassing spatial and bodily dimensions into the intercultural dialogue enabled by interactions with texts. A crucial aspect of such material intertextuality is rendered by the tropes of snake women, stone women and icewomen. By embodying mythical legacies of the female experiences of love, childbirth, ageing and loss in the flesh, Patricia Nimmo in “Crocodile Tears” and Fiammarosa in “Cold” experience estrangement in the very south they initially chose to escape domestic reality. Only a return home (“Crocodile Tears”), or an elemental compromise between the cold of ice and heat of the desert (“Cold”) offers them the solace they need to escape the cyclicality of the female body. Bernard Lycett-Kean in “Lamia,” conversely, encounters the paradigm of chimeric femininity not in his own, but in the titular Lamia’s body, who becomes his muse and platonic love interest. By refusing to engage in sexual encounters with her, he retains the freedom that women are denied and is able to fully embrace his adoptive French home precisely because he experiences it through the prism of material art alone. Ultimately, the move from the familiar north to the, at times alienating, at times welcoming, south opens intertextual crossovers towards material elements and embodiment. Such potentialities are, nonetheless, defined by strictly coded gender norms.
MediAzioni: Rivista Online di studi interdisciplinari su lingue e culture, 2019
This article examines the role of nationalist rhetoric, post-imperial nostalgia and individual fo... more This article examines the role of nationalist rhetoric, post-imperial nostalgia and individual formation in David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006). Indeed, the coming-of-age story of thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor centres around his dealing with the local, mundane reverberations of events which have global resonance. What are the roles of the historical context of the Falklands War, the 1981 British Nationality Act and Thatcher’s Britain in shaping Jason’s formation? How do representations of nationalism and imperial nostalgia define young masculine identities in a 1980s rural English community? How do acts of resistance address the local implications of global conditions of insecurity and instability?
By considering the impactful presence of the Falklands War in a lower-middle-class village in the English Midlands and mapping them onto a young person’s narrative of development, I analyse how ideals of imperial masculinity determine the protagonist’s process of growth and sociability. In particular, I argue that the intersection between 1980s attitudes around family, traditional gender roles and patriotism, and imperialistic discourses on race promoted by Margaret Thatcher’s policies and style of communication, is a key locus of tension within the novel’s story of formation. Jason’s engagement with imperial models of masculinity is ambiguous: while driven by a desire to belong and also to grow up, Mitchell’s hero refuses to fully embrace a traditional and violent masculinity and is able instead to promote a different type of identity, one where he is at home in the world of dialogue and cross-cultural encounters. Ultimately, in this historical fiction Jason’s ambivalent stance towards the conservative attitude prevalent in his community endows him with a mobile identity, one in which his critical thinking represent a non-hegemonic, anti-imperial form of collective memory.
Neo-Victorian Studies, 2019
In neo-Victorian gold-rush novels, the Pacific coasts of California and New Zealand are liminal s... more In neo-Victorian gold-rush novels, the Pacific coasts of California and New Zealand are liminal spaces where clashes and encounters between Asian, Australasian and American cultures occur. In particular, frontier town communities in Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2003) and Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune (1999) portray the problematic hierarchy established by the white, predominantly male ruling class over Chinese migrants. Pao Yi (in Tremain) and Tao Chi’en (in Allende), victims of the traumatic experience of the Opium Wars and the loss of their families, are reduced to a marginal role in the settlement enterprise, and subjected to violent discrimination from the white prospectors. They will find unexpected allies in another silenced minority in the frontier town, namely women of English heritage. This article argues that the friendships and romantic relations, which eventually develop between these two groups of excluded people, challenge imperial hegemony from within. Such Anglo-Chinese crossings disrupt the Victorian system of social and racial hierarchies, and represent a new postcolonial and neo-Victorian community based on cross-cultural integration and equality.
Partial Answers: the Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2018
How do women travelling the colonial frontier create a feminine, and potentially less hierarchica... more How do women travelling the colonial frontier create a feminine, and potentially less hierarchical type of modernity? And how does Neo-Victorian fiction explore gendered and racialized types of modernity through the use of travel? Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013) represesnts the quest for a postcolonial and feminine modernity through the trope of the woman traveler, worker, storyteller and entrepreneur. In particular, protagonists Anna Whetherell and Lydia Wells oppose the highly racist and sexist societies of gold rush frontier towns of the 1860s New Zealand through solitary travel on foot, by sea and across textual layers. This paper argues that such independent solitary women travelers stand for a new representation of white women in colonial contexts and challenge traditional categories of Victorian femininity, such as the dichotomous opposition between the Angel in the House and the fallen woman. By shifting across white femininity and queer Chinese identities (in Anna’s case), and by embracing a masculine, capitalist model (for Lydia), Catton’s heroines survive, on their own, as members of a minority in the communities of white, male miners. The two women thus embody new types of femininity and, while placing themselves outside the colonial hierarchy, they question the social structure, the exploitation of the Other (the woman, the Chinese) and set an example for a more viable and more equal society born out of colonial settlement. Finally, while shaping modernity through their female gaze and a free way of travelling the peripheries, the two women also accomplish their own Bildung process and, forgers of their own fortunes, symbolize the shift from masculine, imperial modernity to a feminine, neo-Victorian, postcolonial paradigm.
Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest, Dec 2014
Wonder Tales in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt, edited by Alexandra Cheira, 2023
A modern rendition of the Arabian Nights’ vortex of embedded stories, intertwining Middle Eastern... more A modern rendition of the Arabian Nights’ vortex of embedded stories, intertwining Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and Anglophone traditions, A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ (1994) is a veritable treasure chest of narrative voices, intertextualities, and the magic of storytelling. Read as either ‘a feminist narratology’ (Campbell: 190) or an orientalist exploration of how a western female traveller fares in an exoticized east (Renk: 115), this postmodern novella intersects the power of stories with the material contingencies of embodied experiences.
Indeed, Byatt’s protagonist Gillian, a female narratologist championing western second-wave feminism while experiencing the qualms of ageing, is juxtaposed to the more-than-human djinn: sharing stories becomes not only a regenerative act of mutual support and a tool in the inevitable romance, but also a strategy to question hierarchies between male and female, east and west, layered, infinite temporalities of supernatural life with the finite, determined scope of human life.
Mixing the metatextual concerns that characterise Byatt’s oeuvre as a whole with a preoccupation with non-human forms of agency which emerges most prolifically in the writer’s later works, I argue here that the magical tropes of glass, water, and – more ambivalently- stone, become key transcorporeal entanglements where the human and the non-human intersect, opening the possibilities of shared, infinite narratives. Enmeshed in a tripartite system of chronological frameworks (linear, circular and layered), the novella balances a focus on the politics of its here and now, the 1990s, with the expanded temporality of the overlapping narratives, becoming storied matter, and bridging the boundary between narrative and embodied materiality, between word and world.
Neo-Victorian Decadences, ed. by Kostas Boyiopoulos and Joseph Thorne, 2022
This chapter analyses the relationship between artists’ lives, artworks and ekphrasis in A. S. By... more This chapter analyses the relationship between artists’ lives, artworks and ekphrasis in A. S. Byatt’s neo-Victorian novel The Children’s Book (2009) and the neo-Decadent joint biography of William Morris and Mariano Fortuny, Peacock and Vine (2016). By taking into account verbal representations that bring art objects to life, I argue that Byatt engages in an act that indulges in neo-Victorian aesthetic pleasure, while also operating a reassessment of Decadent art.
How is the relationship between artists and artworks articulated in these two volumes? What are the roles of the narrator and the reader, as external viewers and as active players in the conjunction between verbal and visual representations? On the one hand, The Children’s Book traces, among its several narrative lines, the story of an artist from his humble origins to success through his numerous sources of inspiration and deploys ekphrastic strategies as narrative drives that define characters’ existences and their creative output.
On the other hand, with Peacock and Vine Byatt takes ekphrasis to a new, metatextual level: she inserts herself within the works of art exhibited at the Fortuny Museum and claims a place for herself within contemporary redefinitions of the designer’s artistic production. This choice has also significance within the neo-Victorian strategies that Peacock and Vine engages in. By physically entering the artistic space, Byatt – with her actual body and her admiration for the artist’s work – makes her twenty-first-century engagement with Decadent art visible, and proposes writing a new neo-Victorian aesthetic that redefines the relationship between art-makers and art-consumers by challenging the boundaries between artists, writers and artworks.
A novel about home, travel, drugs and other forms of addiction, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1... more A novel about home, travel, drugs and other forms of addiction, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) is a narrative of subversion in several respects: while securing its author’s central position in the Victorian sensational canon, it inaugurates the modern detective story with its melodramatic elements. Considered ‘the first and greatest of English detective novels’, The Moonstone takes the Gothic canon, and social critique typical of the Victorian realist novel, to modernity: set between 1799 and the 1840s, it crosses England and its global imperial networks, while questioning the connections between such different spaces. In particular, Collins’s is a novel about Empire, where forms of mobility between goods, people, citizens, colonial subjects, created by the imperial enterprise, become crucial narrative drives. The ways in which travel occurs across landscapes, households, cities, sacred temples and battlefields in England and India shape the novel’s geographies, in that they effectively establish a system of connections and oppositions between here and there, home and abroad, self and Other, that underlies and eventually solves the sensational plot.
A. S. Byatt, before and after Possession: recent critical approaches, 2017
ABSTRACT: In Byatt’s neo-Victorian fiction, mothers who write are a dangerous category of artists... more ABSTRACT: In Byatt’s neo-Victorian fiction, mothers who write are a dangerous category of artists: motherhood becomes a burden for women with artistic ambitions and estranges them from their children. Why do a mother’s writings become fatal to herself and her offspring? When and why does maternity become incompatible with writing? How are families reshaped within the dangerous relationship between mothers, their children and their writing?
As the powers of writing overlap with, and often swallow up women’s responsibilities for blood relations, Christabel LaMotte (in Possession, A Romance) and Olive Wellwood (in The Children’s Book) redefine nineteenth-century family structures and claim a space of their own, where literature is both a punishment and a replacement for their biological offspring.
Conversely, it will be LaMotte’s and Wellwood’s children who address their mothers’ traumas: whether through tragic, irretrievable decisions, or through the discovery of alternate paths towards creativity, the disruptive forces of the mothers’ work is defied by the very generation that has most been affected by detrimental writings.
The sea is an ocean of intertextual relations in A. S. Byatt’s fiction: in her neo-Victorian dipt... more The sea is an ocean of intertextual relations in A. S. Byatt’s fiction: in her neo-Victorian diptych Angels and Insects and the postmodern novel The Biographer’s Tale, Victorian maritime travel is juxtaposed to the seas of literature and creative relations across worlds and texts. This chapter examines how, through the deployment of intertextual strategies, Byatt’s sea narratives juxtapose the imperial seas of the north to the postcolonial crossings of civilizations in the Mediterranean and the South of the Atlantic. Franchi argues that the colonial seas are rewritten into a postcolonial and postmodern sea of words, through the recurrence of the myth of Ulysses and the powerfully transformative image of the maelstrom.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018
How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple form... more How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple forms of Victorian travel literature, such as fiction, travel accounts, newspapers, and poetry, shape perceptions of imperial and national spaces, in the British context and beyond? This collection examines how, in the Victorian era, space and empire were shaped around the notion of boundaries, by travel narratives and practices, and from a variety of methodological and critical perspectives. From the travel writings of artists and polymaths such as Carmen Sylva and Richard Burton, to a reassessment of Rudyard Kipling’s, H. G. Wells’s and Julia Pardoe’s cross-cultural and cross-gender travels, this collection assesses a broad range of canonical and lesser-studied Victorian travel texts and genres, and evaluates the representation of empires, nations, and individual identity in travel accounts covering Europe, Asia, Africa and Britain.
I had the pleasure of speaking to Emma Catan on her wonderful podcast, Victorian Legacies recentl... more I had the pleasure of speaking to Emma Catan on her wonderful podcast, Victorian Legacies recently. We discussed old and new research ideas, the politics of adaptation especially in terms of race and nostalgia, and how to expand the neo-Victorian canon.
I am delighted to invite you all to a forthcoming event devoted to the work of Abdulrazak Gurnah:... more I am delighted to invite you all to a forthcoming event devoted to the work of Abdulrazak Gurnah: “Colonial Traces, Exile, and the 2021 Nobel Prize”. The event will focus on Gurnah’s fiction in the context of the history of colonialism in Africa, migration and refugee writing. It will take place on Tuesday, May 10, from 2.30 to 5 PM, in Hallgarth House Seminar Room, and via Zoom.
Gurnah himself has graciously agreed to pre-record a short Q&A with our guest speakers, Dr Florian Stadtler (Bristol University) and Dr Lucinda Newns (Anglia Ruskin University). The recording will be screened on the day and will be followed by Dr Stadtler’s and Dr Newns’ position papers and a reading group discussion on Gurnah’s latest novel, Afterlives (2020).
The purpose of the afternoon is to encourage as much discussion as possible, so please feel free to invite your PGRs and/or MA students as well. You may want to join for the whole event, or for only parts of it if you are unable to stay for the whole duration. If you’d like to mingle a bit earlier and grab a cup of tea or coffee, please note that the room is booked from 2 pm onwards.
If you would like to attend, in person or on Zoom, please sign up on the relevant Eventbrite links.
In Sarah Moss’s novels, the boundaries between nature and culture, between geological, biological... more In Sarah Moss’s novels, the boundaries between nature and culture, between geological, biological and historical memory intersect and overlap. Her novels are mostly located in rural landscapes where living conditions are extreme, such as holiday campsites with neither electricity nor phone signal, remote islands off the northern Scottish coast, or a re-enactment of pre-Roman life around Hadrian’s Wall. Here, make-shift, small, human communities are shaped by the weather, the tides, the soil, the flora and fauna, while troubling desires and fears manifest themselves more freely than in the social conventions of city life. The uncanny becomes an everyday presence in such human-environment interactions, so much so that literal ghosts from the past reappear to haunt Moss’s contemporary protagonists. In this respect, Ghost Wall (2018) and Summerwater (2020) explore the dangers of British nationalist tendencies in light of Brexit, while Night Waking focuses on how the ghosts of a family’s past embody collective traumas of cultural imperialism. Starting from the bog people in Ghost Wall which literally re-emerge from the earth and the skeleton of a baby found in the garden in Night Waking (2011), this lecture will explore how the memory of the land shapes collective and historical memory. It will examine, in particular, how Moss unearths contemporary xenophobia as a direct legacy of the traumas of Empire. British national identity and its English variation, therefore, are contentious spaces where past ideologies generate contemporary monsters, but where the natural environment can also act as an even more ancestral antidote.
Keynote lecture for: On Potentialities, 6 th ASYRAS Conference. This paper argues that neo-Victo... more Keynote lecture for: On Potentialities, 6 th ASYRAS Conference.
This paper argues that neo-Victorian fiction about empire draws a fruitful parallel between subaltern subjects and non-human forms of life, in order to establish a counter-colonial strategy and create a narrative of ecocritical potentiality. To what extent are non-human forms of life and subaltern subjects given an agency of their own in novels that look the legacy of political, economic and cultural imperialism through its impact on the natural environment? How do these subjectivities translate their lack of agency into a counternarrative of potential to (not-)be and resistance?
If, indeed, the ‘interlacing of politics and life’ (Agamben, Homo Sacer 1998: 120) generates the power structures that define hierarchies in human societies, it equally shapes the separation between fulfilled lives (bios) and lives reduced to their bare essence (zoē). In the context of imperialism, the divisions effected by power are entirely the product of human ambition and hubris; nonetheless, as Rosi Braidotti highlights, they have significant consequences on the ‘human-non-human linkages’ (‘A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities’, 2018: 5) that are involved in these human enterprises.
Such an interconnection is central in Amitav Ghosh’s work; in both the essay The Great Derangement (2016) and the Ibis Trilogy he demonstrates that the causes of the current climate crisis lie in the history of European colonialism and ensuing globalisation. Indeed, in the first two novels of the series, Sea of Poppies (2008) and River of Smoke (2011), the opium trade in China that preludes to the first opium war determines the use of resources and the reduction, by the English colonisers and Western traders, of Indian and Chinese individuals and communities to subaltern subjects. Similarly, in Byatt’s ‘Morpho Eugenia’ (from Angels and Insects, 1991) and The Biographer’s Tale (2000), Victorian explorations in the Amazon forest and the process of classifying insects are depicted both as an imperial strategy of ownership and control over exploitable lands, but also as an attempt to justify the establishment of the structural separation between ethnic groups, and between different living species.
By analysing the connection between the opium culture and trade, indenture and plant-hunting in Ghosh, and the ways in which modern entomology produces the destruction of forest habitats and human’s animalistic instincts in Byatt, I argue that the two writers stage such hierarchical separations precisely to expose the detrimental effects of imperial exploitation on human communities, polities and the natural environment. Ultimately, Ghosh and Byatt shape their narratives around a world that is ‘neither anthropocentric nor anthropomorphic, but rather geo-political, eco-sophical and proudly zoē-centred’ (Braidotti, The Posthuman 2013: 194). By shifting the paradigm from an anthropocentric approach towards anti-imperial strategies, these texts offer ecocritical potential and establish agency enabled by the interconnectedness of all forms of life on earth.
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas
Feminism is one of the most contentious terms in current discourse, being continually invoked, re... more Feminism is one of the most contentious terms in current discourse, being continually invoked, rejected, dismissed, and appropriated by a number of subjects, in the academic, the political and the social activism spheres.
This special issue was spurred by a desire to reduce the gap between feminist theory and practice, and to create conversations across a diversity of disciplines and perspectives. From social psychology to media studies, postcolonial literature and the intersection between visual arts and politics, the contributions of this issue offer a broad range of approaches to crucial questions in 21st century feminisms: what is the role of women’s participation in political protests? What are the models of female representation in popular culture and the arts? To what extent do the personal and the political intersect in contemporary societies? How are diverse feminist agendas pursued, in current feminist activism and in the academia?
We hope that this issue will appeal not only to the scholars of feminism from across such fields as literature, art and cultural studies, as well as the social sciences, social geography, religious studies and history, but also to the activist, the blogger, the journalist – anyone genuinely interested in the significance and variety of feminisms today.
ESSE 2021 Conference Paper, 2021
How does the human experience generate posthuman forms of existence, and how do human, non-human ... more How does the human experience generate posthuman forms of existence, and how do human, non-human and posthuman coexist? When does the intra-action between human behaviour,
In Sarah Moss’s historical novel Bodies of Light (2014), young nurse May Moberley dies mysterious... more In Sarah Moss’s historical novel Bodies of Light (2014), young nurse May Moberley dies mysteriously in a storm in 1878 while trying to return to mainland Scotland from the (fictional) island of Colsay, where she had tried to work towards reducing child mortality. In Night Waking (2011), the novel’s contemporary sequel, historian Anna Bennet uncovers the story behind May’s disappearance by finding her letters and a child’s skeleton in her summer house. The Victorian woman’s traces disrupt Anna’s complicated domesticity, made of juggling childcare with nightly academic work; at the same time, they become a haunting presence enabling her to redefine her relationship to the island, her body, and her work as a historian.
How do rural islands allow hidden histories to resurface in the present? What is the relationship between the traumas of Victorian (lost) motherhood and millennial feminist attempts to successfully combine motherhood with an intellectual career? And how do Gothic shores become textual palimpsests, where historical traces engender the conjuring and creation of new stories?
In this paper, I argue that Moss’s Colsay embodies layers of ‘unofficial history’ (Timothy Baker, Contemporary Scottish Gothic: 90) and establishes uncanny connections across centuries, shaping female body politics, cultural perceptions of maternity, and women’s ability to write their own histories. While a tragedy affecting a Victorian rural community haunts twenty-first-century Anna’s family struggles, it nonetheless enables her to take agency over her life and career. The body of the dead child, a Gothic memento mori of dire living conditions in the past, represents therefore the birth of Anna’s new intellectual life as a feminist historian, allowing her to inscribe the history of her life within the haunting traces left by her foremothers.
In Autumn 2016, upon receiving Erasmus Prize in Amsterdam, A. S. Byatt thanked ‘the European nove... more In Autumn 2016, upon receiving Erasmus Prize in Amsterdam, A. S. Byatt thanked ‘the European novel’ (Interview with Phillips) for having shaped her writing throughout her career. Indeed, from her intertextual references to Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco in the structure of Possession: A Romance (1990) to her rewriting of Old Norse sagas in Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011), Byatt’s oeuvre engages in a constant dialogue with the ‘mythical thread running through contemporary European fiction’ (Franken, A.S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity xiv).
How do such literary crossings respond to ideas on national identity and cultural? How can literature represent the relation between national and European identities, at a time when this very coexistence is questioned by Brexit? In this paper, I analyse how The Children’s Book (2009) and Ragnarok: The End of the Gods deploy children’s literature to define a European cultural memory that transcends borders. In particular, by depicting the viewpoint of young soldiers posted to the front of the First World War (in The Children’s Book) and a little girl experiencing the traumas of the Second World War (in Ragnarok), Byatt shows how reading and writing stories forms one’s identity, as part of a nation and as part of a wider, continental community. Equally, I argue how in Peacock and Vine (2016), her biography of William Morris and Mariano Fortuny, Byatt traces a European common ground residing in artistic, intertextual and textile crossovers. Morris’s and Fortuny’s ability to integrate international influences in their work allowed them to redefine Victorian and fin-de-siècle material culture through a pan-European perspective.
At a time of tension, uncertainty and doubt as to Britain’s position within/out the European project, Byatt’s writings crucially highlight how the arts have contributed, across the centuries, to constructing a shared, European cultural memory which found in international crosspollinations and intersections its very reason to exist and resist.
‘If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody this is it: have nothing in your house that yo... more ‘If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody this is it: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’ (Morris, Hopes and Fears for Art, 1882): this quote that A. S. Byatt recalls upon her visit to William Morris’s houses emblematically summarises the craft of the neo-Victorian novelist as well. Indeed, when writing about Victorian artists, be they real, like Morris and Mariano Fortuny in her biography Peacock and Vine (2016) or fictional, like the potters Philip Warren and Benedict Fludd in her novel The Children’s Book (2009), Byatt combines the usefulness of her subjects’ example with the aesthetic beauty that their artefacts produce on her.
How do existing and fictive artworks, textiles and pots from the Arts and Crafts Movement and the late-Victorian Decadence define and enable the writing process? How can material traces become objects of aesthetic and literary indulgence in a neo-Victorian re-evocation of the fin-de-siècle culture? And how does Byatt reconcile her perspective as a viewer, reader and consumer of nineteenth-century art with her own creative viewpoint as a writer? This paper examines how, by indulging in her own admiration for late-nineteenth-century artefacts, Byatt recreates the neo-Victorian Decadence by writing ekphrases and through her nostalgic vision, ‘drunk on aquamarine light’ (Peacock and Vine).
In The Children’s Book and Peacock and Vine, the aesthetic pleasure that Fortuny’s, Morris’s, and the fictitious potters’ artworks produce, lies therefore in the nostalgic desire for golden times past, which the writer shares with her readers, and which are redefined with a touch of golden fabric, or with the magic words bringing it to life.
The narration of maritime voyages and their role in scientific explorations represents a key inte... more The narration of maritime voyages and their role in scientific explorations represents a key intersection between nineteenth-century travel writing and science. The legacy of ‘the “great age” of scientific travel’ (Pratt, Imperial Eyes 38) finds fruitful terrain in its neo-Victorian renditions, where the connection between travel culture and the making of science is complicated further by the chronological distance between nineteenth-century past and its twentieth- and twenty-first-century recuperation.
This paper analyses how, in Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992), A. S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale (2000) and Amy Sackville’s The Still Point (2010), the retracing of Victorian scientific expeditions creates a literary and intertextual legacy between contemporary readers and their Victorian ancestors. In particular, the protagonists of these novels are either literary scholars (Byatt), or direct descendants of Victorian scientists and travel writers (Swift and Sackville) who embark on literary-biographical quests in the footsteps of three Victorian explorers and polymaths. Driven by a desire to establish a taxonomic classification of their nineteenth-century subjects’ writings, naturalistic specimen and memorabilia, the neo-Victorian heroes build an ‘imaginative history’ (Beer, Darwin’s Plots 6), where storytelling becomes a form of literary travel across seas of textualities and material culture connecting the present to the past.
These neo-Victorian storytellers eventually abandon their search for truth and authenticity by writing themselves into the narratives they seek to recuperate. The recuperation of the past in the archive therefore enables epiphanic discoveries of one’s own sense of self in the present and allows to break free from the heavy, inherited past. By crossing the boundless seas of texts and by rewriting Victorian narratives of travel and scientific discovery, neo-Victorian heroes pave the way for a new future, related to – but equally at a distance from – one’s past.
Bibliography:
Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: CUP, 1983. Print.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.
Consumed by Desire: Opium, Gold and Sexual Desires in the neo-Victorian Empire The neo-Victorian... more Consumed by Desire: Opium, Gold and Sexual Desires in the neo-Victorian Empire
The neo-Victorian empire is made of liminal spaces ruled by desires, where natural elements become treasurable material commodities, and individuals are consumed by their physical addictions. In particular, in Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013), Rose Tremain’s The Colour (2004), and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), the pursuit of profit through gold and opium is not only a powerful metaphor of capitalist gain and expansion, but also the currency through which gendered identities are defined along the ladder of imperial hierarchies.
In gold-rush New Zealand and across the Indian Ocean prior to the Opium Wars, the colonialist project is represented as a story of masculinity in development. Driven by their desire for riches, British entrepreneurs Dick Mannering (in Catton), Joseph Blackstone (in Tremain), and Benjamin Burnham (in Ghosh) make their own fortunes through the exploitation of natural and human resources. Such self-made men are nonetheless challenged in their enterprises by the alliances that the subjects they oppress, Chinese and Indian men, forge between one another and with white women. The emblematic cases of Anna Wetherell’s friendship with Ah Sook (in Catton), the romantic attachment between Harriet Blackstone and Pao Yi (in Tremain) and the homoerotic tones of the relationship developing between Ah Fatt and Neel Rattan (in Ghosh) defy the structure of subjugation from within and envisage a new articulation of imperial relations, characterised by cross-cultural desires instead of mere greed.
Consumed by their hubristic arrogance and ambition, the Victorian imperialists create the empire which will ultimately destroy them. Conversely, the neo-Victorian women and their Chinese and Indian male friends find, in their condition of liminality and subalternity, a means to overturn the desires of the blind capitalist agenda into a space of mutual understanding and postcolonial encounter.
How do modern forms of travel encourage female independence? How do solitary women travellers in ... more How do modern forms of travel encourage female independence? How do solitary women travellers in Neo-Victorian fiction create a feminine and less hierarchical form of modernity? Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (2013) and Isabel Allende's Daughter of Fortune (1999) portray the quest for a postcolonial and feminine modernity through the trope of the woman traveller. In particular, two women from the colonies, Anna Whetherell (in Catton) and Eliza Sommers (in Allende) oppose the racist and sexist societies of gold rush frontier towns through solitary travel, cross-dressing and interracial friendships.
In A. S. Byatt’s fiction ‘people who write books are destroyers’ (Interview with Leith, 25 April ... more In A. S. Byatt’s fiction ‘people who write books are destroyers’ (Interview with Leith, 25 April 2009): in particular, women who choose literature over their children are the most dangerous types of writers. This paper examines the connection between secret motherhood, queer families and disruptive writing in Byatt’s novels Possession (1990) and The Children’s Book (2009) by answering the following questions: why do women writers substitute their children with their literary illusions? What is the role of replacement mothers and children? How are families reshaped within the secret relationship between mothers, their children and their writing?
In Possession, while owing her lover Ash both her daughter Maia and her masterpiece Melusine, Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte keeps her motherhood hidden from her daughter, who believes to be her niece, and embodies the literate, unmarried and unloved ‘old witch in a turret,’ (Possession, 500). Similarly, in The Children’s Book, fairy tale author Olive Wellwood, with the assistance of her husband and her sister, shapes their family as a complex web of lies, incest and deceptions. Eventually, she is ready to give up her son’s life for the sake of literary success.
Such instances of denied motherhood become queer, as by embracing the powers of writing over blood relations, Christabel and Olive distance their children and choose a literary space of their own as a replacement for biological offspring. The cause of their estrangement from their children, Byatt’s writing mothers are the tragic victims of the disruptive forces of their own creative illusions.
If A. S. Byatt affirmed that ‘people who write books are destroyers’ (Interview with Leith, 25 Ap... more If A. S. Byatt affirmed that ‘people who write books are destroyers’ (Interview with Leith, 25 April 2009), the most dangerous category of writers in her fiction are mothers. This paper examines the connection between queer motherhood and writing in Possession and The Children’s Book, by answering the following questions: why do a mother’s writings become fatal to herself and her children? What does the incompatibility between maternity and writing imply? How are families reshaped within the queer relationship between mothers, their children and their writing?
In Possession, while owing Ash both Maia and Melusine, Christabel is denied her motherhood, in that she is rejected by her daughter as the unloved ‘old witch in a turret,’ (Possession, 500). Similarly, in The Children’s Book Olive does not hesitate turning her son’s private fairy story into literary success and public acknowledgment. Tom’s suicide and the terrible epilogue of the First World War leave her the childless mother of many.
Such restricted and interrupted motherhoods become queer in their challenging the values of Victorian and Edwardian households: by embracing the powers of writing over blood relations, left to their sisters, Christabel and Olive redefine family structures and claim a space of their own, where literature is both a punishment, and a maieutic replacement for biological offspring. By causing the loss of their children, Byatt’s queer mothers are the ultimate, tragic victims of the disruptive forces of their own creations.
By questioning the power of art and culture over the most disruptive instincts, A. S. Byatt’s The... more By questioning the power of art and culture over the most disruptive instincts, A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009), challenges the viability of perpetual childhood in late-Victorian and Edwardian socialist families. How are ideas and ideals of the child articulated in the Fabian utopia represented in the novel? How sustainable is a model where childhood encompasses adulthood in a permanent state of nature?
Intergenerational relationships are pivotal in the novel in representing the conflicts between the desire for a return to childhood and the social imperatives of adulthood. In particular, the bond between Olive Wellwood, the irresponsible writer of children’s books and her son Tom, who chooses suicide as the ultimate ‘refusal to cope with the challenges of growing-up’ (Uhsadel 2012, 78), epitomises the most detrimental effects of unbalanced parent-children relationships.
The paradigm of Peter Pan is a central intertextual presence in the mother-son relation: Olive attempts to retrieve her lost past in her writings for and about her son, whereas Tom, by choosing isolation, communion with nature and exclusion from human rules of sociability, uncannily becomes the ‘Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up’ (464). Through his fatal act, Tom is frozen in a state of eternal childhood which is unachievable if not in death; his epilogue exposes the unsustainability of the perpetual childhood ideal across generations.
Conversely, for other children of the shattered socialist dream it is by accepting adulthood that a productive return to childhood is possible: Tom’s friend and antonym Julian Cain discovers his vocation for poetry and starts writing nostalgic verses and nursery rhymes in the hell of the First World War trenches. With his ability to recall childhood through art in the midst of combat, Julian claims literature as a positive medium between early memories and adulthood, and an instrument which makes the horrors of war more sustainable.
From the Seas of the South to the Scandinavian Maelstrom, the representation of sea journeys and ... more From the Seas of the South to the Scandinavian Maelstrom, the representation of sea journeys and water metaphors permeate A. S. Byatt’s fiction. In particular, her neo-Victorian diptych Angels and Insects (1992) opposes Victorian myths of imperial
navigation to the boundless seas of literature. The dichotomy juxtaposes two male characters, the Darwinian
entomologist William Adamson, protagonist of ‘Morpho Eugenia,’ and the post-racial reincarnation of
Ulysses, Captain Papagay. In addition, ‘The Conjugial Angel’ compares the power of spiritualism to
literature in connecting the living with the dead. Through a literary genealogy which includes the historical
characters of Alfred Tennyson, his sister Emily and Arthur Hallam, the narrative questions the effectiveness
of mediumship while establishing a parallel between different forms of female creativity and authorship.
Conversely, in the postmodern novel The Biographer’s Tale (2000) a multiplicity of intertextual and
historical links is contained in the recurring image of the Maelstrom. A source of sublime attraction, the
vortex of the Northern Seas haunts the narrative’s protagonist, Phineas G. Nanson, but also the existences of
the intellectual whose biography Nanson is attempting to write, Scholes Destry-Scholes, and the latter’s own
research subjects. A metaphor entailing vertiginous layers of signification, the Maelstrom mirrors the hero’s
enthusiasm for literary biography, while representing the void of any scholarly information, thus making the
very idea of biography impossible. Ultimately, Byatt’s sea narratives are metatextual journeys across the
creative and disruptive powers of literature and writing.
From Robert Louis Stevenson’s “the sea is English” to ancient, timeless mariners, the Victorian s... more From Robert Louis Stevenson’s “the sea is English” to ancient, timeless mariners, the Victorian sea myths and metaphors, with their global and local connotations, are major features in Booker Prize-winner A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects (1992). Firstly, unity is given to the collection by a frame of three overseas journeys. The beginning of ‘Morpho Eugenia’ recalls, in a flashback, the hero William Adamson’s return from the Amazons, while at the end of the same novella he sails back to the rainforest on Captain Arturo Papagay’s ship. The third and final journey is the Captain’s unexpected return home, at the end of ‘The Conjugal Angel’.
William and the Captain epitomize the two main opposing myths of the sea explored by Byatt in the two novellas. As an evolutionary scientist and as a Victorian, in fact, William perceives the sea as a distance to be crossed and roamed in order to explore, decode and therefore own the mysteries of the natural world. William’s Anglo-centric point of view on the faraway lands lying beyond the sea is the very reason he, at the beginning of ‘Morpho Eugenia’, leaves his research in the Amazons for England. Eventually, he lands on the imaginary entrapping island of the incestuous Alabaster family, but manages to escape and to find a new sea of possibilities open to him.
For the Captain, conversely, the sea represents the challenge of man against nature and a potential danger, but also the place allowing encounter between different cultures, as his “mixed racial origin” (Byatt, 168) confirms. His continuous shipwrecks, his miraculous survivals and his final journey home to his wife give him immortal, mythical connotations: the Captain appears to belong to eternity and to the whole world. He clearly embodies the myth of Ulysses, as reinforced by his long absence from home and his wife’s patience in waiting for him.
In addition to these opposing interpretations of the sea, in the novella on spiritualism ‘The Conjugal Angel’ Byatt also explores the parallel between sea journeys and death, seen as a journey to the afterlife. Byatt largely draws such metaphors from Tennyson’s In Memoriam and relates them in particular to Emily Tennyson, who appears in the novella, and her impossibility to overcome her grief for the loss of Arthur Hallam who, unlike Captain Papagay, cannot return. The Laureate’s elegy and the hidden intertext of his poem Ulysses, therefore, mediate sea metaphors to the mourning living and add to both the mythical as well as the Victorian imageries of the sea. Unity in Angels and Insects is given, at last, in poetry and by the links it creates between the temporal Victorian sea and the literary, mythical sea of eternity.
By integrating and reinterpreting the Victorian sea, with its local, global and metaphoric connotations, Angels and Insects gives the contemporary reader a precise and historically coherent insight into the period A. S. Byatt admires most, both as a writer and as a passionate reader.
"A 20th century Bildungsroman formed by four volumes, A. S. Byatt’s Frederica Quartet represents ... more "A 20th century Bildungsroman formed by four volumes, A. S. Byatt’s Frederica Quartet represents the most thorough expression of the construction of English identity within the novelist’s entire production. The Quartet, in fact, depicts Frederica Potter’s process of growth as a path through integration within English culture.
Britishness in the Quartet is evoked by an intricate web of intertextuality and metafiction, mostly belonging to what Lena Steveker, in the wake of Jan Assmann's work, defined as ‘British cultural memory’ (Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt, 87). So, allegorical representations and the literary “presence” of the greatest figures of British culture, such as Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Blake and George Eliot, effectively place and establish the heroine as English.
In this view, Still Life marks a caesura between Frederica’s adolescence and adulthood, interestingly stressed by her journey to Southern France. Provencal colours and traditions, mediated by Van Gogh’s paintings, represent an estranging reality where integration is not possible. Her journey, therefore, claims Frederica’s Britishness and states her ultimate belonging to her own country.
However, Byatt’s aim in the Quartet is not to celebrate English tradition: it is to depict her protagonist’s Bildung, which, though having national connotations, has universal validity. Struggling through shaping her destiny, Frederica, like her nineteenth-century ancestor Elizabeth Bennet, finds happiness in life after making the very mistakes that enable her process of growth. So, her Bildung occurs within Franco Moretti’s ‘compromise [where] conflicting principles have indeed reached an accord, but without having lost their diversity’ (The Way of the World, 95). As a consequence, Frederica’s very Britishness is what makes her human, therefore universal. Byatt’s Quartet is ultimately part of the European Bildungsroman tradition and, while describing a particular national context, in reality it gives voice to the universal instances of everyman’s pursuit for happiness.
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Autumn 2021
Mara Cambiaghi's monograph is the latest of the growing number of book-length publications analys... more Mara Cambiaghi's monograph is the latest of the growing number of book-length publications analysing A. S. Byatt's extensive body of work, and a recent addition to Peter Lang's multi-language series, Literary and Cultural Studies, Theory and the New Media.
This poster aims at depicting how contemporary novelist A. S. Byatt deploys sea myths in her Neo-... more This poster aims at depicting how contemporary novelist A. S. Byatt deploys sea myths in her Neo-Victorian collection of novellas Angels and Insects (1992). In particular, representations of the sea operate as transactions between natural and supernatural worlds, namely as encounters with different cultures, colonial explorations, and search for 'contact with the spirit world' (Byatt, 169).
Blog post on ITV's 2016 show Victoria, the difference between historical representation and ficti... more Blog post on ITV's 2016 show Victoria, the difference between historical representation and fictive reinterpretation, and the 2016 BAVS conference Consuming (the) Victorians.
The Conversation, 2023
A. S. Byatt's northern legacies delve into eco-criticism in her last pieces of fiction.
MediAzioni, 2019
This article examines the role of nationalist rhetoric, post-imperial nostalgia and individual fo... more This article examines the role of nationalist rhetoric, post-imperial nostalgia and individual formation in David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (2006). Indeed, the coming-of-age story of thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor centres around his dealing with the local, mundane reverberations of events which have global resonance. What are the roles of the historical context of the Falklands War, the 1981 British Nationality Act and Thatcher’s Britain in shaping Jason’s formation? How do representations of nationalism and imperial nostalgia define young masculine identities in a 1980s rural English community? How do acts of resistance address the local implications of global conditions of insecurity and instability? By considering the impactful presence of the Falklands War in a lower-middle-class village in the English Midlands and mapping them onto a young person’s narrative of development, I analyse how ideals of imperial masculinity determine the protagonist’s process of growth and sociability. In particular, I argue that the intersection between 1980s attitudes around family, traditional gender roles and patriotism, and imperialistic discourses on race promoted by Margaret Thatcher’s policies and style of communication, is a key locus of tension within the novel’s story of formation. Jason’s engagement with imperial models of masculinity is ambiguous: while driven by a desire to belong and also to grow up, Mitchell’s hero refuses to fully embrace a traditional and violent masculinity and is able instead to promote a different type of identity, one where he is at home in the world of dialogue and cross-cultural encounters. Ultimately, in this historical fiction Jason’s ambivalent stance towards the conservative attitude prevalent in his community endows him with a mobile identity, one in which his critical thinking represent a non-hegemonic, anti-imperial form of collective memory.
C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings is a peer-reviewed open access journal published... more C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by the Open Library of Humanities. © 2021 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. OPEN ACCESS Franchi, B., 2021. “Book Review: A.S. Byatt’s Art of Memory by Mara Cambiaghi (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020). ISBN: 9783631814222, 215 pages. E-book price £41.00.” C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, 9(1): 9, pp. 1–7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/c21.3470
What is the role of intertextuality and ekphrasis in A. S. Byatt's novels and short stories? ... more What is the role of intertextuality and ekphrasis in A. S. Byatt's novels and short stories? How does Byatt deploy intertextuality to address the relationship between art as experience and representation? And how do intertextuality and ekphrasis enhance creativity and destructive forces across characters, texts and discourses? This thesis examines how the numerous intertextual and ekphrastic references in Byatt's fiction challenge and complicate the crucial relationship between ideas and matter, and between mental processes and bodily experiences. Starting from Kristeva's theory of intertextuality, I argue how in Byatt reading, storytelling and writing are not only the highly demanding intellectual activities that most of her characters engage with, but also potentially dangerous: writing can kill once written words come to replace actual experience (Chapter 1). Conversely, the visual arts, medicine and science, appearing throughout Byatt's fiction in the form of int...
Contention, 2013
We need to show complete solidarity with those who are standing up for values we share, with thos... more We need to show complete solidarity with those who are standing up for values we share, with those young women in the photos whom we instinctively recognise as us. Timothy Garton Ash 1 All names have been changed to protect the identities of the people named.
Neo-Victorian Studies, 2019
C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, 2021
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2018
Number plate recognition is a system which is designed to capture the registered number plate of ... more Number plate recognition is a system which is designed to capture the registered number plate of vehicles. It avails the user to identify and monitor running vehicles and extract their number plates and obtain their information from the RTO database .This survey paper focuses on the research done in automatic number plate recognition system from past several years and hence shows the advantages and disadvantages of the existing system. It shows the architecture and the methodology currently being used for the extraction of characters from number plate and displaying it. It has illustrated various methods to extract image frames from a streaming cctv footage, recognize the vehicle number and convert it into its corresponding text format. A Machine vision system for the car identification can also help a human operator and cultivate an objective to improve automation of the traffic controlling system using machine-learning tools.
Studies in Travel Writing, 2019
Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present, 2016
We invite papers that assess contemporary women’s writing in the light of material feminism and p... more We invite papers that assess contemporary women’s writing in the light of material feminism and posthumanism. What kind of new epistemologies and ontologies does contemporary women’s fiction design? Contributors are invited to look at human/non-human relations in novels and short stories, as well as at emerging transcorporeal identities, from the point of view of narrative, characterization, but also of narrative voice and reader reception. What dialogue with the “vibrant matter” (Bennett Duke UP 2010) of the world do authors engage with?
Embodied experiences are implicated in chemical, biological, geographical, legal, social and aesthetic processes: how are these reflected in fiction?
Convenors:
* Emilie Walezak (Université Lumière Lyon 2, France), emiliewalezak@yahoo.fr
* Barbara Franchi (Newcastle University, UK), barbara.franchi@newcastle.ac.uk
Please send 250-word proposals by the 15th of January 2020.
Barbara Franchi and Elvan Mutlu, eds., Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel: Spaces, Nations, Empires (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2018) pp.86-106., 2018