Writers, Critics and Epigones: Identity Battles in A.S. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun
Writers, Critics and Epigones: Identity Battles in A.S. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun

Summary/Abstract: On the literary map, the name of the British author I am trying to discuss here, Antonia Susan Byatt, has been placed under the heading ‘postmodernism’, especially due to the author’s prized novel Possession (1990). Nevertheless, the focus of my paper is on Byatt’s début novel, The Shadow of the Sun (1964), as that is the book that drew the first tentative lines of demarcation in the British author’s fictional territory. Among other favourite themes, such as the scientific (in)accuracy of biographical studies or the (lack of) fairness displayed by critics when judging a literary text, alterity and identity remain issues that concern Byatt to the highest degree. That is why this paper tries to identify and analyse the complex literary and personal relationships that most characters seem to have in The Shadow of the Sun in terms of identity/alterity. The British author’s first novel presents two types of identity battles to the reader: the one between writers and critics, on the one hand, and the battle between writers and their epigones/descendants, on the other hand. Both conflicts are depicted by A. S. Byatt in terms of the quality of one’s vision: ‘primary’ (the writer’s) vs ‘secondary’ (the critic’s) (Coleridge’s terms), and they help the reader comprehend Byatt’s position regarding both the author’s creation map and the critic’s attempt to re-draw the former’s literary and cultural boundaries. As the title suggests, this first novel written by Byatt refers the reader to the image of the author as ‘the sun’, compelling this reader to (re)consider the concept of Author, whose death Barthes was to proclaim three years later, in 1967.

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