"Being matter-of-fact about strange things": the supernatural in A.S. Byatt's "Little black book of stories"

• Autores: Carmen Lara Rallo
• Localización: The Short Story in English [Recurso electrónico]: crossing boundaries / Gema Soledad Castillo García (ed. lit.), María Rosa Cabellos Castilla (ed. lit.), Juan Antonio Sánchez Jiménez (ed. lit.), Vincent Carlisle Espínola (ed. lit.), 2006, ISBN 8481387096, págs. 519-531
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • A. S. Byatt’s fifth collection of short stories, Little Black Book of Stories (2003), shares with her first volume of tales, Sugar & Other Stories, not only a miscellaneous quality, but also the incorporation of narratives that deal with the supernatural. However, unlike the stories collected in Sugar, which fit into the category of ghost stories, or those that make up Byatt’s third collection of short fiction, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, where the narratives play with the conventions of the fairy tale genre, the stories of Little develop a special treatment of the supernatural that escapes the limits of categories like ghost story or fairy tale. Indeed, “The Thing in the Forest,” “A Stone Woman” and “The Pink Ribbon” transcend the boundaries between the real and the fantastic by placing the extraordinary and the ordinary on the same level, so that the characters in these stories display a matter-of-fact attitude towards strange things. In this context, the aim of the present paper is to investigate Byatt’s new treatment of the supernatural in Little by analysing the stories published in her latest collection of short stories.