Historiographic metafiction
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"By analogy, what would characterize postmodernism in fiction would be what I here call “historiographic metafiction,” those popular paradoxical works like García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Grass’s The Tin Drum, Fowles’s A Maggot, Doctorow’s Loon Lake, Reed’s The Terrible Twos, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Findley’s Famous Last Words, Rushdie’s Shame, and the list could go on."--A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) Linda Hutcheon |
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Historiographic metafiction is a term coined by Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988). Works of historiographic metafiction are "those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages".
Historiographic metafiction is a quintessentially postmodern art form, with a reliance upon textual play, parody and historical re-conceptualization. Rather than viewing history as a transcendent or wholly definable object of inquiry or representation, historiographic metafiction sees engagements with history as necessarily being discursive, situational, and above all, textual. These (re)visions to history allow for new perspectives and identities to rise out of culturally marginalized positions. While at once being eminently political, historiographic metafiction problematizes categories of essential unity and historical representation.
Examples
Works often described as examples of historiographic metafiction include: The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (1969), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (1975), Legs by William Kennedy (1975), Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (1979), Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981), The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor (1989), Possession by A. S. Byatt (1990), The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992), The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee (1994), and Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon (1997).
By seeking to represent both actual historical events from World War II while, at the same time, problematizing the very notion of doing exactly that, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) features a metafictional, "Janus-headed" perspective. Literary scholar Bran Nicol argues that Vonnegut's novel features "a more directly political edge to metafiction" compared to the writings of Robert Coover, John Barth, and Vladimir Nabokov.
See also
