Lesbian disPossession : the apparitionalization and sensationalization of female homosexuality in A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance

The author unearths the retrograde politics of lesbian sexuality that inform A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance. She investigates Possession’s use of blanching metaphors and spectral intertextualization (from James to Coleridge) by which Blanche Glover’s lesbianism is apparitionalized. Parallels are also drawn between Glover/Leonora Stern and the construction of “good”/“dangerous” homosexuals in UK parliamentary discourse attending the Section 28 amendment, which sought legally to curtail homosexual visibility in the late 1980s, when Possession was written.