Michèle Roberts, Impossible Saints

Sarah Falcus (Hamamatsu University)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kerry Myler (Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1997

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Impossible Saints was published five years after Daughters of the House and is a return to Roberts’s earlier preoccupation with the rewriting of Judaeo-Christian myths and traditions, which is largely absent from the intervening In the Red Kitchen (1990). Impossible Saints builds upon the fragmentary structure of The Book of Mrs Noah (1987), combining a number of narrative threads, set in different times and places. What holds these tales together is not an Ark, or a writers’ group, however, but the issue of sainthood in the Christian tradition. Stretching the boundaries of the novel, Roberts combines rewritings of tales of the saints, based upon Jacobus de Voragine’s fifteenth-…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

2188 words

Citation: Falcus, Sarah. "Impossible Saints". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 12 July 2006 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10498, accessed 27 November 2024.]

Save this article