"Stories within Stories": fairy tales as intertextual fragments in A. S. Byatt’s Possession: a romance

Abstract

A. S. Byatt has written several collections of short stories, some of them focussing on a rewriting of the fairy-tale genre, as is the case of The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories (1994), but also to a lesser extent, of some of the stories of Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1999) and of Little Black Book of Stories (2003). Some of the stories in The Djinn in te Nightingale’s Eye, namely, “Gode’s Story” and “The Glass Coffin”, were previously part of the novel Possession: A Romance (1989), where they play a specific role in the narrative framework. Embedding stories within stories is part of Byatt’s writing style, which can be seen in other longer fictions, like the novella “Morpho Eugenia” and most of her other novels. Thus, it is the purpose of this paper to look at the ways these short stories, which can subsist in their own narrative terms, are embedded in longer narratives and the function they play there.