Detecting Histories and the Past: The Letter in A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990)
Detecting Histories and the Past: The Letter in A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990)
Author(s): Vesselin BudakovSubject(s): History, Language and Literature Studies, Cultural history, Foreign languages learning, Studies of Literature, History of ideas, Social history, Translation Studies, Theory of Literature, British Literature
Published by: Великотърновски университет „Св. св. Кирил и Методий”
Keywords: epistolarity; letters; metafiction; history; novel; romance.
Summary/Abstract: In A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990), two accidentally discovered letters, carefully tucked between the pages of a copy of Vico’s Principi di scienza nuova in the London Library, open a vigorous investigation of the past. The subtitle implies that this is a quest story whose main characters set out on a detective-like scholarly journey to identify the addressee of these letters, consequently leading to the discovery of a clandestine intimate correspondence, well concealed for a hundred years, between two fictional nineteenth-centuryintellectuals, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. The intertwined viewpoints of Victorianism and postmodernism, embodied by the Ash-LaMotte and Michell-Bailey pairs, evolve through a dialogue across time, reflecting on the present about the past. Possession presents a metafictional approach to the construction and invention of history that, later in her On Histories and Stories (2000), Byatt discusses through a theoretical perspective concerning the methods of writing and interpreting historical narratives.
Journal: Studia Philologica Universitatis Velikotarnovensis
- Issue Year: 43/2025
- Issue No: 3.2
- Page Range: 321-342
- Page Count: 21
- Language: English
