A.S. Byatt’s Possession A Postmodernist Perspective Analysis

Abstract

Antonia Susan Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel Possession is one of the best Metafictional examples, which incorporates multiple voices and narrators ,intertextuality, irony through juxtaposition, use of anachronism and critical parody, refusal chronology and dialogic polyphony of various voices that focus on the plurality of truth. Moreover, the plethora use of epigraphs and episodesare magnificently employed in the novel. In fact, all of these aspects shape the novels that are entitled to be postmodernist. It is intended in this paper to examine the structure of the novel; i.e., illustrating the postmodern aspects such as the use of intertextulaity, epigraphs, past and present, and the unattainablity of truth. Besides, Byattcriticizes the role of women in the Victorian era, and elaborates the passive roles that women had in their societies. Such a criticism, as the paper sheds some light on,is considered a dominant theme in the postmodernist novels. Accordingly, Possession is one of the richest texts that providean ample material covertly and overtly ready to examine against the postmodernist aspects