The Post-modern Romance

A.S. Byatt is an important writer, poet and critic in contemporary British literature.Possession: a Romance is her representative novel, which had a great vogue and won the highest prize of English literature, the Booker Prize and the Irish Times/Aer Lingus International FictionPrize in 1990. Possession is a romance with post-modern writing techniques. On the one hand,Byatt uses collage to make the novel become scattered, ceterless and uncertain, which are post-modern features. On the other hand, the all-embracing features of romance makes it possible tokeep the literary genres purity. Every genre is special because of its special form in the time thatform is content. Form has become an effective strategy for authors to express their meaning of works and their ideas of literature.In Possession: a Romance, the letters and diaries give full play to the advantages of privatewriting, show the neglected subjective from the perspective of history, and by the interaction withVictorian narrative, the female journal writers' and the poets' writing construct the Victorian timewhich is difficult to prove its truth. The poetry and criticism texts show the post-modern romanticcharacters with its own unique language style: The three independent poem show the process fromthe tragic that scientific rationality and supernatural defeat suffer disappointment in the presentworld, to the deconstruction of Hero Elegy in the post-modern society which is lost the faith. And inthe irony and intertextuality of introduction in every chapter and the parody of post-moderncriticism, a number of 20 century literary researchers who are influenced by post-structuralismtheory and whose subjectivity is deconstructed can be seen clearly. Tales hold a magic world withits own principle, while embeded in the novel as some metafictional texts, they have become thehomogeneousness of frame narrative, which in the post-modern perspective is fiction of novels.Byatt's purpose, however, is not to prove that novels are fiction, but that novels are stories, andstories are both fiction and reality, both the past and the present. They have happened and can berepeated in the moment. The enthusiasm of stories and retelling stories is the center of Byatt's whole literary creation.