ABSTRACT
Possession is a study and a defence of the modes of writing by which Byatt is most excited. Byatt's Victorian romance Possession is to point out that its apparent postmodernism is belied by Byatt's commitment to a coherent narrative structure. Commentators variously oppose the novel's postmodernist gestures and strategies to its "modernism" or its "Victorianism". Byatt uses the term "ventriloquism" to describe the type of historical writing she offers in Possession. Byatt's ventriloquism seeks to enact a more intimate relationship between the past and the present and especially between past and present literatures than she feels is encouraged in the contemporary literary and academic climate. Byatt says that the germ of her novel was in fact the word which became its title: 'possession'. Her interest in the meanings of this word was first sparked in the early 1970s when she saw a scholar in the British Museum library who had spent her professional life studying Coleridge.
