Reconstructed Past: Postmodern Historicism in the Novels Water land, Flaubert's Parrot and Hawksmoor

Abstract

The British writers Graham Swift, Peter Ackroyd and Julian Barnes have attempted to create an alternative history in their fictions which counter the mainstream/ official history. Their fictions subvert the objectivity of history, provides fictional representation of past, and also blurs the boundary between fiction and history. To offer alternative constructions in history writing, these writers use historiographic metafiction technique that problematizes mainstream history and replaces it with alternative discourses. Historiographic metafiction is fiction which uses metafictional techniques to remind us that history is a construction, not something natural that equates to the past. History is not the past, but a narrative based on documents and other material created in the past. Postmodern writers do not see much difference between history and fiction. This genre has failed to represent reality of the past/history in its actual form. With an analytical survey of discourses on this genre, the dissertation provides ground for discourses on the place of history in postmodern fiction. The focus is on how these British writers treat the past/history in order to argue that their fictional works are more representative than any other official/mainstream histories. These three British fictions that tend to access the truth through the both ways objectivity of history and subjectivity of fiction by fictionalization of Flaubert’s biography, recounting the histories of the French Revolution and of the Fens region in eastern England and combining the two different stories of the eighteenth-century architect, Nicholas Dyer and of the twentieth-century detective, Nicholas Hawksmoor.