Text and image in the fiction of Anita Brookner and A. S. Byatt

This dissertation takes up the intersection and interdependence of visual and verbal modes of expression in the fiction of two contemporary British women writers, Anita Brookner and A. S. Byatt. I combine a practice of semiotics with a reframing of poststructuralist theories on text and image to pursue the historical, cultural, theoretical, generic, and biographical issues raised by the fiction of these two novelists within the larger context of the "pictorial turn," or gradual proliferation of images, in postmodern "visual culture." By juxtaposing these two particular writers, we see a new pattern emerge within British fiction in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Produced by novelists who came to writing after a long practice of art history and literary criticism, this fiction seems to position itself beyond the concerns of both the historical approach of the Sister Arts tradition and the semiotic revolution of the 1960s. My four chapters are thus linked by an argument about the unique position occupied, within contemporary British fiction, by an emerging trend of "academic postmodern realist novelists," whose short stories and novels pertain to the British realist tradition while revealing an acute awareness of postmodern concerns with the status of text and image. What we gain by thinking of Brookner and Byatt together is an understanding of two very different treatments of text-and-image relationships within literary texts as well as two contrasting discourses on the image within the context of postmodern "visual culture." I come to the conclusion that while Byatt celebrates the image in its complexity and ultimate opacity by developing innovative iconotextual strategies that attempt to cross the boundaries between the verbal and the visual, Brookner, who uses the pictorial image mostly didactically and allegorically, presents an ambivalent discourse on the image where her obvious infatuation with the visual, or iconophilia, is counterbalanced by the signs of an equally as strong and patent iconopobia. What both writers have in common, however, is that they use the pictorial image to provide a reflection on the notion of representation and its limits as well as to re-think the act of reading itself.