SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE AND CRISIS OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IN S. BYATT’S NOVELS
Journal Title: ІНОЗЕМНА ФІЛОЛОГІЯ - Year 2017, Vol 130, Issue
Abstract
In the paper, the philosophical issues raised in A.S. Byatt’s novels have been outlined. The bonds between the religious crisіs in A. S. Byatt’s English Victorian and Retro-Victorian novels have been elucidated. The discussion about the two cultures initiated by Ch. P. Snow and its interpretation in A. S. Byatt’s novels have been explained. The specific features of the discussion about the two cultures have been spotlighted taking into account the analyzed novels. The intertextual relations between the texts have been explained. A.S. Byatt’s works have been analyzed as representative ones in order to demonstrate a specific transformation of the English novel from postmodern to post-postmodern. The complex system of key topics and motifs has been determined. Using hermeneutic and myth-criticism approaches the Christian motifs and the old Scandinavian myths represented in A. S. Byatt’s novels have been revealed. The author of the paper examines Byatt’s writing about the Victorian crisis of faith and belief in science. Both of these topics are also of great relevance to the writer’s novels set in the 20th century. In Byatt’s fiction set in the Victorian period, however, we can see the process of the opposition between religion and science at work, often within one character. Throughout the nineteenth century the requirement to believe in Christian Truths was eroded by the human need to know and to seek a new Truth based on curiosity and understanding rather than faith. In fact, a link between her fiction set in the nineteenth century and that set in A. S. Byatt’s own lifetime is that both involved a move from religious faith which, as mentioned in this paper, the author rejected even in his childhood to a conviction that science provides many of the answers that the characters seek, especially concerning environmental issues. Byatt’s latest book, a reworking of the Scandinavian myths of the downfall of the gods, Raknarök, is the culmination of this process, a tale of the destruction of the natural world and gods.
Authors and Affiliations
Dmytro Drozdovskyi
Keywords
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- EP ID EP291812
- DOI 10.30970/fpl.2017.130.1508
- Views 140
- Downloads 0
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