6/6/2023 0 Comments Possession vintage byattIt is primarily the association of letters with secrets and seduction that signifies the surrender of Possession to its subtitle, A Romance, which the epigraph to the novel justifies as ‘a right to present truth under circumstances, of the writer’s own choosing or creation’. Letters and diaries navigate contentions between theory and writerly authority as Byatt harmonises seductive secrets and descriptive imagery to launch a counter-attack against prescriptive critical reading. 3 Her novel attempts to deliver this message by pitting documents and secrets against representative literary theorists. 2 Byatt believes there are diverse reasons to keep the past ‘alive’, one of which is ‘the aesthetic need to write coloured and metaphorical language, to keep past literatures alive and singing, connecting the pleasure of writing to the pleasure of reading’. Byatt manipulates the fascination of lost, destroyed, hidden, and rediscovered documents to signpost readers to ‘the romance of the archive’. In her 1990 novel, Possession: A Romance, A.
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