A Happy Blending Of The Features Of Writing Techniques Of The Traditional And The Postmodernist Novels

Possession is one of Byatt's most successful works. After its publication in 1991, it won the Booker Prize for Fiction immediately. Possession is characterized as a romance created under the background of postmodernism. Although the features of writing techniques of traditional and postmodernist novels seem to be incompatible with each other, they are integrated into the novel harmoniously and perfectly. The author of this thesis intends to have a tentative study of the novel's characteristics of the combination of the narrative skills of the traditional and the postmodernist fictions, by means of employing the postmodernist literary theory.A. S. Byatt once studied in Cambridge, and she knew the Victorian tradition very well. Byatt parodies large amount of poems in Possession, altogether more than 1600 lines, which are obviously composed by a talented Victorian poet. She provides complete plots and structure, vividly-portrayed characters, and explicit theme to her works, which all have their own archetypes borrowed from classical literary works. And she also grants traditional features of narrative strategy to Possession. Byatt's Possession not only has traditional features, but has postmodernist narrative skills, such as intertextuality, short circuit, collage and carnivalesque quality. She attempts to apply diverse literary genres into this book intentionally, such as poetry, autobiography, mythology, fairy tale, correspondence and prose. At the same time, she introduces plenty of ideologies and viewpoints of modernist philosophy, psychology, biology and physics into her works. Generally speaking, Byatt shows favoritism for tradition and has strong postmodernist consciousness; she loves traditional realism and the closed ending of the story, but she admits the fictitiousness of the traditional literature. She inherits the tradition based on well understanding of presence.This thesis consists of five chapters:The introduction provides an overview of A. S. Byatt's life and her literary achievements; it gives a brief introduction of the story of Possession; brings forward the significance and necessity in carrying out the research; and presents the existing study on her works at home and broad.The second chapter presents an introduction of modernism and postmodernism, including the developing backgrounds, the contents and the features, simultaneously, the similarities and differences between them are also exhibited. Then it sums up the characteristics of postmodernist narrative skills, which will be analyzed in details in Chapter Four.The third chapter focuses on the features of writing techniques of the Victorian traditional novel embodied in Possession: the structure and plot archetypes, the traditional feature of narrative strategy, the vividly-portrayed characters, the complete plot and the explicit theme.The fourth chapter probes into the postmodernist narrative strategies employed in the novel. It illustrates that the novel combines literary creation and criticism by intertextuality, explores fictitious textual quality by short circuit, overturns the traditional conception of history by collage and presents the multi-voicedness and polyphonic features of various voices and consciousnesses by carnivalesque quality by means of a deep analysis of Possession.The fifth chapter is a summary of the thesis and a restatement of the main points of its argument. It draws the conclusion that there is a happy blending of the features of writing techniques of the traditional and the postmodernist novel in Possession and it displays the factors that account for the combination. The method of comparison and contrast between traditional and postmodernist novel will be employed in writing the chapter.