This thesis examines the novels of Christine Brooke-Rose and A. S. Byatt in order to question the extent to which contemporary British novelists are free to innovate with the forms of literary realism, forms that have a long and valued tradition in British literary production. Both authors, I argue, have reassessed the limits of the realist novel over the course of their careers, and the specific ways in which they engage with, or depart from, their literary inheritance are discussed. The introduction contextualises the literary climate out of which the two writers emerge. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was a commonplace of literary criticism to declare the “death of the English novel.” In the years following modernist experimentation, British novelists made a conscious return to the mimetic realism of the nineteenth century. Rather than the intellectual sterility that is often assumed to have dominated this period, I observe that there were in fact many writers who were continuing the innovations of the preceding generations, Christine Brooke-Rose and A. S. Byatt amongst them. To view realism to be in need of renewal is first of all to view literary production in terms of an ontological-historical distinction of texts as types of objects. It may be also to neglect the ways in which literary history is always already in dialogue with the present. Both authors have made concerted efforts to refresh literary realism; however, they have proceeded in very different ways. Brooke-Rose has experimented with the content and the form of the novel in order to renew conventions she insists are fatigued or overworked. The novels she has published since 1964 depart radically from what would ordinarily be recognised as realist fictions as they make no attempt to disguise their own textuality. Byatt, on the other hand, has reassessed realism through the forms of realism itself. Through an engagement with literary history, she revisits realism to pursue what has always been of value within it. In so doing, she creates a developmental model of literary production in which literary debts are made visible in the work of the contemporary writer. Chapter One examines Thru, the literary experiment for which Brooke-Rose is most celebrated. My starting point is her claim, following Roland Barthes’s S/Z, that she is the author of writerly as opposed to readerly texts. I argue that to establish any such easy opposition is to neglect Barthes’s departure from the polemicism that had marked his earlier work. Rather than interrogating how well her texts are supported by her claim to be writerly, I turn the opposition around in order to examine precisely how Barthes’s readerly operates within Thru. Through a close reading both of the novel and of Barthes, I illustrate that many characteristics of literary realism that Brooke-Rose argues are exhausted, in particular characterisation and narration, are still operating in Thru. Chapter Two develops Brooke-Rose’s opposition of readerly and writerly in order to examine its consequence for her own experimental writing. Here I return to Thru to demonstrate the ways in which Barthes’s readerly and writerly operate as interdependent processes rather than as opposing terms. I then reconsider her earliest work, a period she has since disavowed. I argue that rather than a separation, there is a continuum between her earliest works and her later, more experimental, writing that has not been recognised by the author or her critics. In Chapter Three I turn my attention to Byatt’s insistence on a developmental model of literary production. Here I identify the role that evolutionary narratives play in her texts. Two of her works, Possession and “Morpho Eugenia” are set largely in 1859, a year in which a specific epistemological emergence was to reconsider genealogical relations. In this chapter I examine the writings she invents for her characters and argue that she takes metaphors from natural history in order, not only to show the close relationship between literature and natural history, but to provide her reader with a framework of literary-generational descent. Chapter Four examines more closely the ways in which Byatt converses with her literary predecessors. She offers a version of realism that has always been concerned with perception, and with the impossibility of translating that perception into verisimilar fiction. In this chapter I identify the role that art works play within two of Byatt’s earlier novels, The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, as she finds in them the same metaphorical ambiguities that bind the language of the novelist to imprecision. I then examine the ways in which metaphor works in these novels to elude precise signification of meaning. Chapter Five returns to Byatt’s neo-Victorian texts, Possession and Angels and Insects, and examines the author’s ventriloquism of her Victorian characters, which includes Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. Ventriloquism, I argue, is concerned with a remembrance of the literary dead within the present work and is thus an expression of mourning. However, to avoid melancholia the new text must also emphasise its difference from that which is being ventriloquised. I then discuss Byatt’s focus on nineteenth-century spiritualism, as it is through the trope of the séance that she reconsiders the afterlife of literary history itself. The final chapter examines the role of the critic. The mourning of Byatt’s fictionalised Tennyson is singular and overpowering. Chapter Six begins with a consideration of two of Possession’s critics, Mortimer Cropper and Leonora Stern, whose readings, I argue, are similar to Tennyson’s mourning in their inhospitality to other readings, other mournings of the literary text. I compare Cropper and Stern to Possession’s other critics, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, whom Byatt places in the role of literary heir. Not only do Roland and Maud display an essential respect for the texts that they study, but also their reading is open to revision. The literary text, as Barthes argues, must always keep in reserve some essential meaning. Only through interpretive revision, Byatt implies, is the promise of this hopeful-yet-impossible revelation made to the reader.

This thesis examines the portrayal of authorship in Byatt’s novels with a particular focus on her use of character-authors as a site for the destabilisation of dominant literary and cultural paradigms. Byatt has been perceived as a liberal-humanist author, ambivalent to postmodern, post-structuralist and feminist literary theory. Whilst Byatt’s frame narratives are realist and align with liberal-humanist values, she employs many different genres in the embedded texts written by her character-authors, including fairy-tale, life-writing and historical drama. The diverse representational practices in the novels construct a metafictional commentary on realism, undermining its conventions and conservative politics. My analysis focuses on the relationship between the embedded texts and the frame narrative to demonstrate that Byatt’s strategies of representation enact a postmodern complicitous critique of literary conventions and grand narratives. Many of the female protagonists and minor characters are authors, in the broad sense of cultural production, and Byatt uses their engagement with representation of women in literature to pose questions about how cultural narratives naturalise patriarchal definitions of femininity. That Byatt’s female characters resist patriarchal power relations by undermining the cultural script of conventional femininity has been under-explored and consequently critics have overlooked significant instances of female agency. Whilst some branches of postmodern and feminism literary theory have conceptualised agency differently, this thesis emphasises their shared analysis of the discursive construction of subjectivity, as it illuminates Byatt’s disruption of literary conventions. My focus on the embedded texts and the discursive construction of authorship in Byatt’s fiction enables me to address the numerous paradoxes and inconsistencies in the novels as fertile sites that undermine Byatt’s presumed politics.

This paper explores the contemporary reader´s fascination with the Victorian period focusing on Michel Faber´s neo-Victorian novel The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). By comparing and contrasting various literary elements that link the Victorian novel to contemporary neo-Victorian fiction it simultaneously shows the similarities and differences between the nineteenth-century Victorian sensorium and that of the present day. It puts particular emphasis on the sensory perceptions of vision and smell, since those two senses are the most prominent ones in Victorian and neo-Victorian fiction and they are also regarded as extremes on the sensory scale. The nineteenth-century urban hygiene campaign transformed, in particular, the perception of olfaction. This study concludes that our contemporary society bears many similarities to the Victorian period as a society of great change. The renewed interest in the Victorian signifies the twenty-first century reader´s desire for an idealized world set in another time, which yet appears familiar and recognizable. Neo-Victorian fiction thus functions as a means of knowing both your heritage and finding your own place in the present day. The sensory perception of foremost smell is part of our cultural heritage and thus the neo-Victorian novel mirrors the deo-Victorian concept.

This research report explores the link between the novels of Ingrid Winterbach / Lettie Viljoen, a third culture and the neo-Victorian novel. The study is therefore situated within the cultural-philosophical framework of a third culture, which implies that the two cultures of science and literature do not function as separate disciplines, but as an organic unit. Researchers in the interdiscipline of literature and science identify the Age of Science (1879–1914) – including the Victorian era (1837–1901) – as a historical period where the existence of such a third culture was observed. This period was characterised by numerous scientific discoveries, and Darwin’s theory of evolution generated heated debates in Victorian society. Nineteenth-century literature (and specifically the Victorian novel) therefore reflects the spirit of an age where the interaction between science and literature was particularly evident. In our information-driven society, the focus is once again on scientific discovery and dissemination of knowledge, prompting social critics to typify the current period as “neo-” or “retro-Victorian”. The contemporary imagination still problematises Darwin’s theory of evolution, and fiction such as Winterbach’s therefore not only renegotiates the fixed modernistic boundaries between science and literature, but also revisits the nineteenth- century genres simptomatic of a similar third culture. Winterbach’s novels (1984–2006) display a distinctive predisposition towards natural history and Darwinistic principles and are therefore postmodern adaptations of nineteenth-century conventions. Darwinistic concepts such as growth, metamorphosis,transformation, evolution and the origin, naming and extinction of species are therefore accentuated. Winterbach’s fictionalisation of a nineteenth-century worldview can be linked to the work of her ancestors in the Afrikaans literary tradition, Eugène Marais and C. Louis Leipoldt (both amateur scientists). Her popularisation of scientific knowledge and revisitation of Victorian codes also link her to a neo-Victorian novelistic movement (a contemporary permutation of the Victorian tradition). Her oeuvre therefore also displays similarities to that of her British contemporary, A.S. Byatt, a prominent neo-Victorian novelist. An exploration of the natural world in this tradition, however, also implies an exploration of supernatural spheres, a trend which is equally evident in texts by congeners such as (George) Eliot, Marais, Leipoldt, Winterbach and Byatt. / Afrikaans / D.Litt. et Phil. (Afrikaans and Theory of Literature)

This research report explores the link between the novels of Ingrid Winterbach / Lettie Viljoen, a third culture and the neo-Victorian novel. The study is therefore situated within the cultural-philosophical framework of a third culture, which implies that the two cultures of science and literature do not function as separate disciplines, but as an organic unit. Researchers in the interdiscipline of literature and science identify the Age of Science (1879–1914) – including the Victorian era (1837–1901) – as a historical period where the existence of such a third culture was observed. This period was characterised by numerous scientific discoveries, and Darwin’s theory of evolution generated heated debates in Victorian society. Nineteenth-century literature (and specifically the Victorian novel) therefore reflects the spirit of an age where the interaction between science and literature was particularly evident. In our information-driven society, the focus is once again on scientific discovery and dissemination of knowledge, prompting social critics to typify the current period as “neo-” or “retro-Victorian”. The contemporary imagination still problematises Darwin’s theory of evolution, and fiction such as Winterbach’s therefore not only renegotiates the fixed modernistic boundaries between science and literature, but also revisits the nineteenth- century genres simptomatic of a similar third culture. Winterbach’s novels (1984–2006) display a distinctive predisposition towards natural history and Darwinistic principles and are therefore postmodern adaptations of nineteenth-century conventions. Darwinistic concepts such as growth, metamorphosis,transformation, evolution and the origin, naming and extinction of species are therefore accentuated. Winterbach’s fictionalisation of a nineteenth-century worldview can be linked to the work of her ancestors in the Afrikaans literary tradition, Eugène Marais and C. Louis Leipoldt (both amateur scientists). Her popularisation of scientific knowledge and revisitation of Victorian codes also link her to a neo-Victorian novelistic movement (a contemporary permutation of the Victorian tradition). Her oeuvre therefore also displays similarities to that of her British contemporary, A.S. Byatt, a prominent neo-Victorian novelist. An exploration of the natural world in this tradition, however, also implies an exploration of supernatural spheres, a trend which is equally evident in texts by congeners such as (George) Eliot, Marais, Leipoldt, Winterbach and Byatt. / Afrikaans / D.Litt. et Phil. (Afrikaans and Theory of Literature)