Fairytale Rewriting In A.S.Byatt’s The Children’s Book

Antonia Susan Byatt is a distinguished and prolific novelist in the contemporary British literature,renowned for her art of juxtaposition of magic and realistic narrative.Set in the golden Edwardian England,The Children’s Book plots the fortunes of three intricately riddling families amid the vicissitudes of the age,presenting a panoramic interplay between the fairytale and the Edwardian era.Byatt’s elaborate narrative exudes both the breadth of the historicity and the magnetism of the imagination.This thesis mainly delves into the literary intentions of Byatt’s fairytale rewriting in The Children’s Book.Chapter One covers the multiple functions of the fairytale and confirms both the tradition and contemporaneity of fairytale rewriting.Under the influence of such a great tradition,Byatt’s fairytale rewriting inherits the traditional function of the fairytale,yet on the other hand utters a postmodern subversion against the institutionalized and stereotyped fragments of the genre.Chapter Two expands on Byatt’s inheritance of the traditional function of the genre.It argues how Byatt uses fairytale rewriting as the representation of Edwardian domestic crisis to further expose and criticize the dominant ideologies and social conflicts of the age.Byatt rewrites “Hansel and Gretel” and “Bluebeard” to address the predicament facing Edwardian motherhood,and to approach paternal incest as a collective consciousness of the era.Fairytale rewriting thus serves as a literary carrier of Byatt’s familial ethical concerns.Chapter Three explores Byatt’s critical intention to deconstruct the fairytale discourse via her rewriting.Byatt’s rewriting of the classic motif of quest and metamorphosis mirrors Tom’s entrapment of the split selfhood and Dorothy’s escapement out of the body-mind dilemma.By depicting the growth of Tom and Dorothy,Byatt deconstructs the role of fairy tales in constructing selfhood and femininity,which reveals Byatt’s postmodern demythologization.Byatt’s fairytale rewriting in The Children’s Book inherits and reorients the forms and motifs of the genre.Deeply rooted in the tradition,it interrogates the sociocultural conflicts of the Edwardian age;keeping a critical distance from the paradigmatic narrative,it breaks the constraint of fairytale discourse on the subjectivity and best illustrates Byatt’s postmodern critique on the genre.