Stories of Parallel Lives and the Status Anxieties of Contemporary Historicism

This article explores the conceit of “parallel lives” that characterized plays, novels, and films of the late 1980s and 1990s (perhaps most famously, A. S. Byatt’s Possession). In this subgenre, threats to cultural distinction turn into fantasies specifically about historical discontinuity, which is both threatened by and rescued by an eerie parallel between historically distinct layers of the narrative.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe