A Dialogue Between New And Old Historicism

A.S. Byatt is well-established both as a writer and a literary critic, which qualifies her to write with theoretical self-consciousness. An essential feature of Byatt's stands on many theoretical issues is her ambivalent attitude, which makes her academic novels open to controversial interpretations. Her Booker Prize-winning novel Possession stands as an outstanding example in which, this paper holds, Byatt carries out a dialogue between her theoretical consciousness derived from new historicism and her pursuit for an"innocent"sense of historical truth based on conventional historicism without showing her definite preference.In Possession, Byatt lays bare an ambivalent attitude towards the representation of historical truth. On one hand, in the nineteenth-century plot of Possession, Byatt constructs a fractured textual history of the romantic tragedy of two Victorian poets, reflecting the textuality, ideologicality, controversiality, fragmentarity and fictiveness of history, which echoes the new historicist assumptions on history. On the other hand, employing various narrative techniques, Byatt manages to fill in the gaps and ruptures in the textual history to provide the reader with a history of coherence and closure. This may be viewed as a dialogue on the accessibility of history between new historicism and old historicism.This thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter one is an introduction of the thesis, introducing Byatt and her novel Possession, literary theories involved in the accessibility of history, existing studies on Possession and the significance and need for conducting this study.Chapter two deals with Byatt's fictionalization of her theoretical self-consciousness of the inaccessibility of history. It explores the strategies Byatt employs to present a fractured textual history in Possession from the perspectives of both misrepresentation and misinterpretation of history.Chapter three is intended to discuss Byatt's pursuit of"innocence"in Possession also from two perspectives: representation and interpretation of history. In spite of her suspicion of the totalizing and coherent historical representation, Byatt presents a story of coherence and closure and she believes readers can get certain access to the past by abandoning over-intellectualization and resorting to primordial forces.Chapter four is a further analysis of chapter two and chapter three. It argues that the new historicist consciousness tackled in chapter two and the old historicist consciousness investigated in chapter three are engaged in a dialogue in the novel.Chapter five is the conclusion of this thesis. Firstly, Possession doesn't take a definite stand on the accessibility of history, but rather an ambivalent one in a dialogic way. Secondly, the juxtaposition of the two stands on recapturing historical truth is a method Byatt employs to deal with a dilemma she is confronted with while writing a historical novel: to be frustratingly sophisticated or to be attractively innocent. Thirdly, the dialogue demonstrates the writer's ambivalent attitude towards postmodern theories; it contains both a recourse to and a backlash against theory. Finally, this paper holds that the controversies found in Possession criticism are resulted from readers'voices engaged in the dialogue, which is anticipated by the writer.