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Babel Tower (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

At a glance:

Babel Tower, like all of Antonia Susan Byatt’s fiction, examines the lives of middle-class Britons, even as it focuses on a central female character. As in Angels and Insects (1992), Byatt develops a clever extended comparison between the societal life of lower animal forms and that of people, and she integrates this metaphor into her narrative. The moths and butterflies of Angels and Insects have their counterpart in the snails of Babel Tower. The changes which environment produces within their similarity becomes the key to understanding the evolutionary...

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