‘Ekphrasis’ in Selected Works by A. S. Byatt and Radwa Ashour: A Comparative Cultural Approach

Abstract

The study examines the manifestation of ekphrastic literary writing in the selected works of A.S. Byatt and Radwa Ashour. The selected works that make the basic material of the study are seven of Ashour's books, and nine of Byatt's short fiction. They are Byatt's three stories 1: "Medusa's Ankles", "Art Work", and "The Chinese Lobster" from The Matisse Stories (1993); the short story "The Glass Coffin" and the novella "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" from The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994); and "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary", "A Lamia in the Cévennes", "Crocodile Tears" from Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998) and "A Stone Woman" in Little Black Book of Stories (2003). The selections from Ashour's works include: The Journey (1983), Specters (1999) Khadija and Sawsan (1989)2, The Reports of Mrs R. (2001), A Piece of Europe (2003), Heavier than Radwa (2013), and The Scream (2015). The study is a comparative cultural study that benefits from theories of culture, signs, semantics, semiotics, paratextuality, postcoloniality and others. It tackles the properties of rhetorical ekphrastic literary representation on three levels; artistic adaptation, historical reintroduction, and adaptation of personae. The thesis is thus made up of four chapters. The first one lays the theoretical foundation of the thesis. It is entitled "Ekphrastic Adaptation in Literary Theory". The second chapter that tackles ekphrastic adaptation from art is entitled "Rhetorical Ekphrastic Adaptation of Art". Chapter three is dedicated to the examination of the ekphrastic representation of history; it is entitled "Rhetorical Ekphrasis in the Reintroduction of History". The last chapter examines the literary representation of characters in the selected works and is entitled "The Rhetorical Ekphrastic Adaptation of Personae". Conclusion follows.