Exploring A.S. Byatt's unique narrative techniques, this study delves into her short fiction and novellas, emphasizing themes of life, creativity, and death. It analyzes how Byatt employs various literary and linguistic models to enhance readers' comprehension of complex issues. The examination includes intertextuality within the two novellas from "Angels and Insects" and selected stories from her six volumes of short fiction, offering insights into her intricate storytelling and thematic depth.
Further to the first book, Writers of the Spanish Civil War: The Testimony of Their Auto/Biographies (2011), which featured the writings on the war (1936–39) of six key British and American authors: Gerald Brenan, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Laurie Lee, this new work studies the actions in the war of those physically involved and writings focused on the war, either at the time or later, by eight more foreign authors: Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, Franz Borkenau, V. S. Pritchett, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler, Martha Gellhorn and Peter Kemp. In addition to comparing their autobiographies with what their biographers said, in order to show up any discrepancies, as had been done in the first book, here, the texts are scrutinized to detect use of stereotypes or adaptation of the material to other purposes in the writing. New perspectives are introduced now in that two of the authors are women, one writing from a distance but deeply affected by the war (Virginia Woolf) and one active in journalism on the spot (Martha Gellhorn), and our final author, Peter Kemp, went to Spain to fight on the side of the Nationalists under Franco as opposed to the Republicans.
This book brings together new essays on six of the most important British and American writers who lived in or visited Spain in the 20th century and whose work bears the impact of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of its outbreak, the new angle on the relations between these authors and Spain is the examination of the mutual bond and its fruits from the point of view of life-writing. The six writers – five British and one American – are presented in chronological order of their birth: Gerald Brenan, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Stephen Spender and Laurie Lee. Their autobiographies, or what they wrote about their lives in or in relation to Spain, are contrasted with the often multiple biographies that were written on them.
