The Properties Of Metafiction In A.s. Byatt's Tetralogy

A. S. Byatt, the member of British Royal Society of Literature and one of the outstanding representatives of modern women writers, is a famous novelist and critic who is well-known for various writing features including the portray of women intellectuals, the preference of college novels, the combination of realism and postmodernism and the employment of self-reflexive. Taking her tetralogy—The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman as target works, the thesis explores the relationship between reality and fiction by employing the discussion of both features and techniques of metafiction. The study on the tetralogy as a unity is still a blank in China and this thesis will deepen the systematic analysis on A. S. Byatt.The thesis consists of five parts. The first chapter offers a brief introduction of the current situation of modern British literature and the target works. In the meantime, the synthesis of critical ideas about Byatt and her tetralogy at home and abroad is given, which leads to the value and thesis statement of the paper.The second chapter focuses on the theory of metafiction. The term of metafiction which mainly self-consciously concentrates on the relationship between reading and writing, fiction and reality originates from seventeenth century but later is redefined by the modernists that metafiction is the"fiction about fiction". The third chapter reveals how the features of metafiction are reflected in Byatt's tetralogy through the analysis of reader-writer relationship and reality-fiction relationship which includes the study of the roles of readers and writers, the reality of language, the fiction of history and the "real" in fiction. The fourth chapter embodies the metafictional techniques. Parody which makes the reader concern with both past and present is one of the common methods used in exploring metafiction. Intertextuality and multiple text layers further highlight the properties of metafiction. Through the analysis of the properties of metafiction in the tetralogy, the thesis finally draws the conclusion that the reason why Byatt adopts metafictional features and techniques into her tetralogy lies in her purpose of exploring the relationship between fiction and reality and emphasizing the fictionality of the novels and the textuality of the real world.