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    A Study Guide for A. S. Byatt's "Art Work"
    A Study Guide for A. S. Byatt's "Art Work"
    A Study Guide for A. S. Byatt's "Art Work"
    Ebook43 pages33 minutes

    A Study Guide for A. S. Byatt's "Art Work"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for A. S. Byatt's "Art Work," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535818742
    A Study Guide for A. S. Byatt's "Art Work"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for A. S. Byatt's "Art Work" - Gale

      08

      Art Work

      A. S. Byatt

      1993

      Introduction

      Art Work, by the English novelist, short story writer, and literary critic A. S. Byatt, was first published in The Matisse Stories in 1993 after Byatt's most popular novel, Possession: A Romance (1990), had made her famous. Art Work is the second of three short stories in the collection based on paintings by Henri Matisse. Her fiction is filled with intelligent people who are creative thinkers, inspired by great art and philosophy. Her stories demonstrate how art can widen and enrich understanding, even when the definition of art keeps changing. Byatt admits to being obsessed with Matisse as a touchstone for art, and although he appears in every story in the collection, it was not planned that way. The stories were collected as a group later.

      In Art Work, the Dennisons are artists who love Matisse's paintings. However, they are taught an important lesson by their cleaning lady, Mrs. Brown, whose garish tastes clash with their own and with Matisse's classic style. Byatt is one of the most famous English postmodern, or avant-garde, experimental novelists to date. In this story, she continues ideas raised in her novels, by entertaining the theme of the breakdown between high art and popular culture, as the cleaning lady's artwork is given a showing in a gallery over the artist's. The story is widely discussed in classes and by critics because it illustrates the dilemmas of life and art in the late twentieth century. The Matisse Stories was reissued in paperback by Vintage in 1996.

      Author Biography

      A. S. Byatt was born Antonia Susan Drabble on August 24, 1936, in Sheffield, England, the eldest of four children, to Kathleen Bloor Drabble and John Frederick Drabble. Her father was a judge; her mother was a former elementary school-teacher, angry at having to give up her career for her family. Though her parents came from working-class families, they had studied at Cambridge, and the household was one of books, conversation, music, and art. Her younger sister, Margaret Drabble, is also a successful and well-known novelist.

      As a child, the author was not happy attending a Quaker boarding school in York, where she was quiet and socially withdrawn, but it was there she began writing at age thirteen. She thought Cambridge was paradise, however, and did her undergraduate work at Newnham College, coming under the influence of F. R. Leavis and the New Criticism. She graduated in 1957 with honors, then studied for a while at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. At Somerville College, Oxford, she studied as a postgraduate, doing work on seventeenth-century allegory.

      In 1959, she married (Sir) Ian Byatt, a British economist, and had two children. In the 1960s, she taught at the University of London and the Central School of Art and Design. She wrote

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