Susana Onega

This is the first full-length study of Jeanette Winterson’s complete oeuvre, offering detailed analysis of her nine novels as well as addressing her non-fiction and minor fictional work. Susana Onega combines the study of formal issues such as narrative structure, perspective and point of view with thematic analyses approached from a variety of theoretical perspectives, from narratology and feminist theory to Hermetic and Kabalistic symbolism, to provide a comprehensive ‘vertical’ analysis of Winterson’s novels.Onega reveals the books as complex linguistic artefacts, crammed with intertextual echoes. She demonstrates the inseparability of form and meaning within Winterson’s work, and positions her within the wider context of contemporary British fiction alongside fellow visionaries such as Peter Ackroyd, Maureen Duffy and Marina Warner.

This is the first full-length study of Jeanette Winterson’s complete oeuvre, offering detailed analysis of her nine novels as well as addressing her non-fiction and minor fictional work. Susana Onega combines the study of formal issues such as narrative structure, perspective and point of view with thematic analyses approached from a variety of theoretical perspectives, from narratology and feminist theory to Hermetic and Kabalistic symbolism, to provide a comprehensive ‘vertical’ analysis of Winterson’s novels.Onega reveals the books as complex linguistic artefacts, crammed with intertextual echoes. She demonstrates the inseparability of form and meaning within Winterson’s work, and positions her within the wider context of contemporary British fiction alongside fellow visionaries such as Peter Ackroyd, Maureen Duffy and Marina Warner.

This text provides an excellent introduction and overview of Narratology, a rapidly growing field in the humanities. Literary narratologists have provided many key concepts and analytical tools which are widely used in the interdisciplinary analysis of such narrative features as plot, point of view, speech presentation, ideological perspective and interpretation. The introduction explains the central concepts of narratology, their historical development, and draws together contemporary trends from many different disciplines into common focus. It offers a compendium of the development of narratology from classical poetics to the present. The essays are all prefaced by individual forewords helping the reader to place each individual selection in context. Recent developments are assessed across disciplines, highlighting the mutual influences of narratology and deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, film and media studies.

Peter Ackroyd (b. 1947) in internationally celebrated as a novelist and also well known as poet, biographer and reviewer. He came to public notice after the publication of his award-winning novel, Hawksmoor (1985), a thrilling historiographic metafiction that combines the horror of an 18th-century gothic tale of ritual murder with the suspense of a 20th-century detective story. A most versatile and prolific writer, Ackroyd sees his different writing activities as part of the same overall attempt to revitalise the English cultural tradition. In the first book-length study to date, Susana Onega’s assessment of Ackroyd’s literary identify treads the entire range of his writings. Topics covered by the book include Ackroyd’s fictional treatment of London, his recovery of the English Catholic cultural tradition; his self-conscious re-writing of history; and the way in which the multilayered interplay of form and meaning in the novels works to enhance the fictionality of the created world while simultaneously suggesting a paradoxical yearning for mythical closure.