An Intertextual Reading Of A.S. Byatt's Possession

Based on a series of intellectual movements taking place in Europe such as Saussure's Linguistics, Russian Formalism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and Marxism, modern theory of intertextuality has gained its prominence and become an important theory since the 1960s with the advocation and promotion of Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes and some other scholars. With time going on, though the theory undergoes several periods of development and different theorists may name the term differently or prefer to study intertextuality from different perspectives, yet on the whole it never goes too far from its core that no text exists in isolation and any text can be an intertext. Therefore, the interpretation of a text is no longer limited to one single text and other texts, sources or materials can be used as reference. In this way, the authority of the author is reduced and readers are offered more originality to appreciate the text within the network of intertextuality based on their knowledge background.Possession(1990), written by English writer A. S. Byatt (1936—),won her the highest literary prize in England—the Booker Prize. Together with other novels such as The Shadow of the Sun, The Virgin in the Garden, Angels and Insects, short story collection of The Matisse Stories and critical works such as Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study and so on, Byatt earned an international fame as an outstanding novelist, short story writer and influential critic. The literary atmosphere of her family and the education she received enabled her to have a good command of a variety of knowledge such as literature, biology and philosophy. By combining her wide knowledge with her concern for history and reality, her self-reflexiveness of art, such as how to express her ideas of reality through her images, Byatt creates an entwined net full of intertextuality in her works as Katherine Coyne Kelly asserts, her work being"the vast intertextual web that includes everything that she reads and thinks and sees"(Kelly 116). Possession is no exception. This thesis attempts to analyze the intertextual phenomena of her work Possession, offering readers fresh ways to better understand Byatt and her work.The thesis will be divided into five chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction of the author A. S. Byatt and her works, Possession's main idea and researches ever done, the theme of the thesis and the methodology adopted in it. The second chapter will mainly focus on the theory of intertextuality, its development and how it will be put into practice in analyzing the intertextuality of Possession theoretically. The third and fourth chapters will be respectively devoted to the concrete analyses of intertextuality of Possession. Chapter three mainly deals with the intertextuality of Possession with sources or materials outside it from two aspects: the intertextuality of Possession with epistolary novels in the 18th and 19th century and Byatt's subversion of Romance and Detective stories and revision of Bildungsroman. Chapter four chiefly concerns self-reference and repetition, a kind of intertextuality within Possession itself. Chapter five summarizes the essence of the intertextuality presented in Possession with sources outside and inside it.Through the study of intertextual phenomena in Possession, we are able to appreciate Byatt's profound knowledge and her charm of artistic creation. Meanwhile, it tells us that the present is not a simple repetition of the past; instead it is more of a breakthrough.