Browsing by Subject "Historiographic Metafiction"
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Item Debate on Historiographic Metafiction: Reading Midnight's Children and Ragtime(Department of English, 2007) Tamli Limbu, SukshmaMidnight's Children and Ragtime, the versions of Indian and American history respectively resist the official history as single, absolute and final history by blurring the boundaries between history and fiction. The novelists both Salman Rushdie and E.L. Doctorow have used historiographic metafiction as narrative technique throughout their novels to fulfill their politics; to let the marginalities to be expressed. Believing in both the history and fiction as human construct, they can not remain untouched by the writers' prejudices and preoccupations, this research study comes to the conclusion that the so-called objective official history is impossible and that is power construct. As history, fiction is also a product of certain socio-political situations of certain time period. Therefore, history and fiction both are equal, relative and subjective. There can be many versions of history. Intermingling history and fiction together Rushdie and Doctorow has redrawn the boundaries of Indian and American history including marginalities in Midnight's children and Ragtime respectively that undermine the so-called official history of India and America.Item History as Fiction and Fiction as History: Reading Doctorow's Ragtime(Department of English, 2007) Karkee, Babu RamEdgar Lawerence Doctrow'sRagtime(1975) is a novel which ironizes racismat the turn-of-the century inAmerica. The racial discrimination between thewhites and theblacks has been explained through the resistance tovandalization of Model T Ford of the colored man,CoalhouseWalker bythewhites. The black people are brutally oppressed and exploited by thewhites. Coalhouse Walker revolts against whites' oppression. In the novel Ragtime, Doctorow has patterned the revolt of Coalhouse Walker after the Civil RightsMovement of the1960s in America. The study highlights a reconditioning of traditional historiography through Doctorow's writing back of the history of black radicalism in the history of the Ragtime Era(1900-1920s). Doctorow has written the history of theRagtime Era in fictional form by highlighting thecontemporary marginal issues through revisionist perspective.The way Doctorow highlights the issue of marginalization ruptures the grand narrative of the Ragtime Era.