SOURCE: Burns, Christy L. “Fantastic Language: Jeanette Winterson's Recovery of the Postmodern World.” Contemporary Literature 37, no. 2 (summer 1996): 278–306.

In the following essay, Burns examines Winterson's effort to revitalize postmodern language and social imagination through the use of fantasy, metafictional disruptions, and eroticized prose that link sexual desire and passion to the power of words.

Jeanette Winterson's novels have always been fantastic, toying with the conventions of fantasy and stretching the limits of the short verbal refrain. Not until recently, however, have her use of fantasy and her liturgical style been explicitly fused into a kind of fantastic language. In Art and Lies, Winterson adopts the voice of Sappho to articulate her concern for the flattened state of language: “Delicate words exhausted through overuse. Bawdy words made temperate by repetition. Enchanting and enchanted words wand broken. … That is the legacy of the dead” (65). Winterson not only attempts to recover the...