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Article: A.S. Byatt's self-mirroring art. (female novelist)
- Article from:
- CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
- Article date:
- January 1, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The award to A.S. Byatt of the 1990 Booker Prize for her romance Possession virtually assures that her fiction will receive increasing critical attention, perhaps equaling that previously accorded to the novels of her sister Margaret Drabble. An interwoven texture of letters, journal entries, poems, and straight narrative, Possession is Byatt's most ambitious work to date; but its subject, situations, characters, and, indeed, its hybrid form have been anticipated in each of her previous novels. From the start, Byatt has combined the methods of a traditional realist with the subject matter and the themes of an aesthete. Hers is the sort of fiction that might have been written ...