This chapter is concerned largely with detailed description and comparative analysis of specific manuscripts and early printed books. It begins from the contents of one manuscript housed in the National Library of Wales (NLW), Peniarth 394D, which contains two practical treatises, the Grosseteste and The Boke of Kervyng. The chapter focuses particularly on the Robert Grosseteste treatise and on John Fitzherbert's printed Book of Husbandry. It also focuses on the contents and literary styles of these treatises with particular reference to the Grosseteste and the Fitzherbert. This focus is to see how these aspects provide more evidence for how practical texts may have been used and read, and by whom. The chapter suggests that Fitzherbert's use of a proverbial style (employing Latin and English) signals this text's subscription to an intentionally popular form of literature.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book develops the theme of the franco-phone contextualisation of Peau noire by concentrating on the specifically Martinican references in the text which have either been effaced or distorted in subsequent representations of Frantz Fanon. It situates Peau noire in the context of racism in metropolitan France. The book focuses specifically on the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism. It discusses Fanon's engagement with another of Paul Sartre's texts, 'Orphée noir', which he wrote as introduction to Léopold Senghor's Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française. The book also discusses Fanon's engagement with Sartre and the tension between universalism and particularism. It traces Fanon's treatment of unconscious processes informing Negrophobia. The book explores different aspects of Fanon's engagement with Sartre in Peau noire.

This introductory chapter discusses A. S. Byatt, a writer with a personal and intellectual dislike of literary criticism that places a heavy emphasis on a writer's life. It first provides some background information on Byatt's early career as a writer and her debut novel, Shadow of a Sun. It studies her commitment to the mutually informative discourses of fiction and literary criticism and her popular reimaginings of the Victorian past. This chapter also studies some of Byatt's novels, which are discussed in detail in the following chapters.

This chapter examines the formal and thematic (dis)continuities between the earlier and later Quartet novels. It studies the prism of Byatt's involvement with modern notions of the breakdown and fragmentation of language in Babel Tower and her fictional considerations of the narratives of science in A Whistling Woman. This chapter determines that her later fictions usually study the conceptual pitfalls and possibilities of ways of world-making across the ‘Two Cultures’ divide.

This chapter discusses the ‘greed’ for reading and the notion of co-creative reading. It studies Byatt's engagement with realism, the premises, possibilities, pitfalls and puzzlement that are explored by the first two Quartet novels in terms of highly original fictional inquiries. This chapter determines that Byatt's fictional probings of realism's problems are informed by the notion that an acknowledgement of the constructed nature of human thought does not necessarily come before the existence of objective realities.

This chapter considers Byatt's critical output and its manifold intersections, both with the institutionalised study of literature in university departments and with the modern book market. It explores Byatt's role as public intellectual and sheds some light on the concept of ‘critical storytelling’. This chapter also describes her commitment to the paradigm of dialogical criticism, or criticism as conversation.

This chapter focuses on the early intersections of Byatt's fiction with both modern debates on the novel and the continuing relationship of mid-twentieth-century literature with the Romantic legacy. It provides readings of The Shadow of the Sun and The Game, which indicate Byatt's life long project of ‘critical storytelling’. It is a practice of storytelling that does not separate the literary from the critical imagination, but instead aims at a deliberate and thoughtful combination of the two ways of seeing and describing the world.

This chapter proposes a reading of Byatt's œeuvre as a continuous series of reimaginings of the art of storytelling and its different (dis)contents. It focuses on Possession and Byatt's interest in the fairytale form. It studies the essentially hermeneutic concept of co-creative reading that Byatt's fictions participate in and also habitually promote. This chapter puts emphasis on a practice of reading that is basically grounded in the use of stories in a culture.