An Analysis Of The Historiographic Writing Strategies Of The Neo-Victorian Novel Possession

Possession is a work written by A.S.Byatt in her brilliant period of writing and got published in1990. It talks about two modern scholars chasing after the mysterious past of two fictive Victorian poets. Its modern and Victorian historical background and writing techniques draw attention from scholars from both home and abroad. The author of this paper conducts her researches on Byatt’s historiographic writing strategies by utilizing theories of Linda Hutcheon and narratological theories. First of all, this paper reviewed some existing researches on Possession done by Chinese and foreign scholars. Thus, from the literature review, the author of this paper deduced to focus on the historiographic writing strategies of Possession as a neo-Victorian novel which is rarely dabbled.First of all, this paper introduces some basic information about neo-Victorian novel. Three aspects are included in this part as historical background of the rising of neo-Victorian novel, its development and its features. Then it comes to the specific strategies applied by Byatt in Possession in her historiographic writing process. In chapter three, the paper focuses on the spatiotemporal strategy of this novel. By employing spatial theory of Joseph Frank and temporal theory of narratology, two perspectives are illustrated. First, history is traced through presenting fictive historical materials to build the temporal order. Then the author analyzed its spatial order that contains history through Victorian locale descriptions. In chapter four, intertext is involved to uncover the historiographic writing strategies of Byatt. Because Byatt uses fairy tales, myths and Victorian poems and historical figures in this novel, the functions of intertexts in contributing to historiographic writing should be analyzed. This paper picks out important intertexts such as The Glass Coffin, Melusina, Proserpina, images in Victorian poems to study on. In this way, her peculiar method of linking history to literature is discovered. The other strategy contributed to historiographic writing in this novel is the suppression strategy. Chapter five tries to analyze the function of the order of presenting history by switching points of view and story layers of the novel.At the end, the author of this paper conclude that Byatt successfully modes Possession into a typical postmodern novel by applying techniques like special form to present time and space, intertexts and shifting of points of view and story layers. As a neo-Victorian novel, its historical background is foregrounded to enlighten the modern people and readers by linking history, reality and literature together.