‘Possessing’ knowledge. Opętanie by Antonia Susan Byatt as a philological campus novel

Abstract

'Opętanie' by Antonia Susan Byatt, awarded the Booker Prize in 1990, has been analysed in the context of romance, detective novel and campus novel genres and interpreted as an apology for philology, praise for literary art as well as a longing for the times when it was the foundation of cultural memory. The multidimensional character and multigenre structure of the novel as well as its ‘immense intertextuality’ have been treated as one of the manifestations of the title ‘possession’, which – in turn – has economical, scientific, social, religious and sexual connotations. We have emphasized the cognitive values of the novel, which are connected with the coexistence of two storylines developing in parallel, namely the contemporary and historical ones. The former focuses on two literary scholars who reveal an affair, clandestine in 19th century text, between a fictional writer-polymath and a feminizing poet. In turn, the latter draws the reader’s attention to the Victorian lovers, and thereby a portrait of this period.