In this moment of possession, the writer's imagination becomes other by fusing with the world exterior to the writer: "No longer a feature of the passive mind, the tabula rasa of Locke and Hartley, the imagination is here the active agent, shaping the world as it finds it, creating it anew with each vision" (Miyoshi 47). Byatt's Possession considers the fall from innocence as a state of imaginative possession. Byatt, Carey, and Swift compare these two narrative traditions in light of one enduring archetypal narrative: the fall from innocence to knowledge.Ī. In the nineteenth century, Romanticism celebrates the wholeness of vision gained by exploring the fantastic and the supernatural in the twentieth century, postmodernism insists upon the fragmented narrative as a more accurate reflection of unruly life. Johnson's claim that "'the nineteenth-century novel' was finished by the outbreak of the First World War.Its wrongness is that it tells a story - and 'telling stories is telling lies'" (19-20). Byatt's own "People in Paper Houses," quotes B. Byatt's Possession(1990), Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda (1988), and Graham Swift's Waterland(1983) all take place in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and they seek to reconcile the nineteenth- and twentieth-century views of the nature of narrative.
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