{"id":10143,"date":"2015-01-21T14:01:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T22:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=10143"},"modified":"2015-01-21T13:11:33","modified_gmt":"2015-01-21T21:11:33","slug":"lit-matters-wintersons-deep-roots-of-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2015\/01\/21\/lit-matters-wintersons-deep-roots-of-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Matters<\/em>: Winterson\u2019s deep roots of art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"9780099562993\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cArt does not imitate life. Art anticipates life.\u201d<\/p>\n

So wrote Jeanette Winterson, a British writer known for her beautiful and unique novels that question how we look at history, sexuality, and even fiction itself.<\/p>\n

Winterson\u2019s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit<\/i>, was a fictionalized account of her childhood spent under the tyranny of a religious mother who burned her books and evicted her at age 16 for having \u201cunnatural passions\u201d towards women.<\/p>\n

Since then she has been a champion for feminist and queer causes and is known for her attempts to break down gender roles. In Written on the Body<\/i>, she constructed a love story, full of affairs with both sexes, in which the first-person narrator never reveals whether he or she is male or female.<\/p>\n

However, the most striking aspect of Winterson\u2019s work is the artful craft of her writing. Winterson believes that good writing, like all art, doesn\u2019t merely describe the world around us. It creates a new and living world.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fiction, the poem, is not a version of the facts,\u201d she wrote. \u201cIt is an entirely different way of seeing.\u201d<\/p>\n

And a new way of seeing forces us to confront our prejudices and our habits. She likens the action of art to a plant with a deep taproot growing amongst plants whose shallow fibre roots cannot penetrate far into the soil.<\/p>\n

\u201cArt puts down its roots into the deepest hiding place of our nature,\u201d and in doing so \u201cunlocks nutrients\u201d that would otherwise lie outside the reach of our everyday experience, according to Winterson.<\/p>\n

Winterson believes our relationship to art and literature should be a passionate love affair, allowing ourselves to be moved and moulded by what we read.<\/p>\n

\u201cArt is large,\u201d she wrote, \u201cand it enlarges you and me.\u201d If you are looking for art to enlarge you, Winterson\u2019s novels are a good place to start.<\/p>\n

Jeanette Winterson must-read:
\n<\/b>Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
\n<\/i>(Lansdowne library code: PR 6073 I615 07)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cArt does not imitate life. Art anticipates life.\u201d So wrote Jeanette Winterson, a British writer known for her beautiful and unique novels that question how we look at history, sexuality, and even fiction itself. Winterson\u2019s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was a fictionalized account of her childhood spent under the tyranny of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10144,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,138],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-january-21-2015"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10145,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10143\/revisions\/10145"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}