Decoding A. S. Byatt’s Possession From The Perspective Of Historiographic Metafiction

A. S. Byatt is one of the most excellent British contemporary female writer, novelist and critic. And The Times newspaper named her on its list of “the 50 greatest British writers since 1945” in 2008. Her Possession: A Romance(1990) has been acknowledged as Byatt’s most famous book and won her Booker Prize in 1991. Since it was published, it has gained a great popularity among both critics and readers for its intricate themes and novelty in narration.This thesis is intended to be divided into three chapters apart form an introduction and a conclusion. The first chapter focuses on analyzing Byatt’s historical consciousness in Possession. Byatt juxtaposes the Victorian era and the modern time, and presents readers the verisimilar Victorian writing style with a double awareness of authenticity as well as their fictionality. For Byatt, fictive world can be as real as actual life; the seemly objective history is subjective. She redefines the relationship between history and literature, especially by challenging the separation of the two discourses, and advocates returning to history as she questions the conclusive history made by historians and biographers. And for this reason, she reconstructs a historical line for the females.The second chapter mainly discusses the narrative pleasure in Possession. This novel is narcissistic in that it is rich for “metafictional paradox” of self-consciousness. Main characters are fairly aware of their language and their fictional identities, and are quite familiar with the literary theoretical terms. Also, Possession tries to break the set form and free it from the set textual boundaries. Vivid visual arts created by a great amount of words in the novel have an effect of oil painting. And recurring classic and medieval legendary themes represent history and inherit culture.Since parody is an integral part in historiographic metafiction, the third chapter aims to explore parodies in Possession. This novel expresses Byatt’s determination, on one hand, to appreciate our connection to our historical past, and on the other hand, to break up with the traditional writing convention.This thesis, in the light of Linda Hutcheon’s historiographical metafictional theory, tries to explore postmodern historiographical metafictional traits used in Byatt’s Possession so as to argue that Byatt as a revolutionary postmodern writer claims an experimental position in the practice and theories of historiographic metafiction, and advocates the renewal of fiction writing. This thesis investigates Byatt’s peculiar historical consciousness in Possession, the ways of creating narrative pleasure and the significant function of parody in this historical metafiction.