摘要：A.S. Byatt's novels are mirrors within which disciplinary and generic opposites such as humanism and religion, art and science, or critical and creative writing reflect each other. Although it sometimes appears that Byatt vaccinates her works against analysis, since to examine one idea in isolation is to risk shattering the complex illusion of the whole, she also signposts the textual play with recurring metaphors which we recognise in different contexts. For example, in her best known work, Possession (1990), the title guides readers across the boundaries of genre and history: in terms of the romance prototype, possession is what happens when one is in love, but also signifies literary critical obsession; in the gothic melodrama and for the Victorian spiritualist, possession was used in the literal sense of the embodied ghost, but even in rational modernity and the postmodern novel we still encounter the almost paranormal way in which our lives seem to be determined by our ancestors. The multivalence of this particular trope allows – indeed demands – that readers and critics consider the significance of its imprinting upon different cultures at a theoretical, even deconstructive, level.
