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Fiction and Truth in Jeanette Winterson's Novels
Zunová, Eliška ; Theinová, Daniela (advisor) ; Poncarová, Petra Johana (referee)
(EN) Stories in Jeanette Winterson's novels have a dual function: on the one hand, canonical narratives can be agents of oppression, rigidity, and the perpetuation of norms and biases; on the other, storytelling can be a force of freedom, self-actualization, and agency. In this thesis, I have analysed three novels from different parts of the author's career - namely Sexing the Cherry (1989), The Stone Gods (2007), and Frankissstein (2019) - reading them alongside some of her other works, to explore how Winterson works with stories and storytelling both as a thematic and structural element, and how she uses them to comment on the relationship between what is invented and what is true. My main focus was on how the two key concepts of "fiction" and "truth" influence each other in Winterson's writing. I argue that these two categories are not contradictory in the author's conception; she repeatedly stresses not only that fiction has the capacity to express truths, but that it can do so more efficiently than rigid adherence to facts. In addition, the author draws a distinction between "the real" and "the true," where the former generally refers to the empirical reality, the outside world that we tend to mediate by discourses of realism and rationalism, and the latter can be understood as that which is...
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