The Relics of the Past in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Possession

Abstract

The present study compares John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman and A. S. Byatt’s Possession in light of their approach towards the role of the relics of the past in historiography. These historiographic metafictions differ in the former’s denial of the possibility of possession of the past because of the totally contaminated nature of the traces and the latter’s ambivalence with regard to the influence of relics on the historian’s historical explantion. The theories of Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon and the studies of Alun Munslow are employed to elaborate on the differences between the speculations of the novels with regard to the notion of evidence in historiography.