The Novel as Genealogical Archive: A. S. Byatt and the Neo-Victorian Novel

Abstract

Abstract

This thesis aims to explore A. S. Byatt’s four neo-Victorian novels in terms of her genealogical analysis of totalizing power focusing on how it is manipulated and deployed to form a dominant archive of knowledge. On this account, Byatt’s neo-Victorian novels provide a frame of resistance by making complexity of history open to discussion and contestation. To begin with, the first section gestures toward Byatt’s concept of collecting and the establishment of the power dynamic of the archive in Possession: A Romance (1990), Morpho Eugenia (1992), and The Biographer’s Tale (2000). The second section examines how history can be used as genealogy to question and re-examine ideological assumptions about the Victorian era through Children's Book (2009). Subsequently, the last section brings together these overlapping themes of power and genealogy to show how the neo-Victorian novel provides strategies for empowerment and resistance to totalizing pressures.