Possession As A Romance-A Stylistic Approach To Possession

Descending from the classic theories on literature, the distinguished critic Northrope Frye thought it would not be enough to classify all kinds of literature under the binary opposition of tragedy and comedy. He further divided the literature into five modes, with romance as one of them. It is his belief that it is improper to call all fictional works novel, which would demolish the original meaning of it. (Frye, 13)The great British female writer Byatt wrote a Booker-Prize Winner Possession with"A Romance"as its subtitle. In this story she employed various narrative forms, interspersing the text with correspondences, poems and academic articles, to name only a few. Thus some critics regard naturally that it is a postmodern pastiche while others believe it should be read as a neo-Victorian novel. Generally speaking, most of the critics take the genre of the story for granted without thinking to justify their assumption.In this thesis, I try to prove that Possession: A Romance, despite its numerous literary trickiness, has distinctive romantic features. Romance is of great significance in the reading of the story. The main theory that is used is Frye's theory of genres.Chapter one is dedicated to the discussion of the word romance. First it explores the origin of the word romance, pointing out its defiant nature against the official history. Later it discussed the consonance between the word romance and the plot of the whole story. Finally it presents the connotation of love in the word romance and its echoing with the plotline. The definition of Frye on romance is also discussed in this chapter. Frye defined romance from the characters and he also raised the theory of the circling phenomenon of five modes in literature, like the four seasons of a year while he identifies romance as the mythos of summer. The chapter has also mentioned briefly the basic characteristics of romance.The second chapter is about the analysis of the characters and their respective image in romance. It mainly centers on the discussion of the romantic features in characterization and plot arrangement. The third chapter is about the concept of history of Byatt and its influence on her artistic creation.The conclusion that could be reached is that it is more proper to classify Possession under the genre romance than any other genres.