Historiographic metafiction


Historiographic metafiction is a term coined by Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon in the late 1980s. It incorporates three domains: fiction, history, and theory.

Concept

The term is used for works of fiction which combine the literary devices of metafiction with historical fiction. Works regarded as historiographic metafiction are also distinguished by frequent allusions to other artistic, historical and literary texts in order to show the extent to which works of both literature and historiography are dependent on the history of discourse.
Although Hutcheon said that historiographic metafiction is not another version of the historical novel, there are scholars who describe it as such, citing that it is simply an updated late-twentieth-century version of the genre for its embrace of the conceptualizations of the novel and of the historical in the twentieth century.
The term is closely associated with works of postmodern literature, usually novels. According to Hutcheon, in "A Poetics of Postmodernism", 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". This is demonstrated in the genres that historiographic metafiction parodies, which it uses and abuses so that each parody constitutes a critique in the way it problematises them. This process is also identified as "subversion" for the purpose of exposing suppressed histories to allow the redefinition of reality and truth.

Examples

Works often described as examples of historiographical metafiction include: William Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, William Kennedy's Legs, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel, A. S. Byatt's Possession, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and many others. By seeking to represent both actual historical events from World War Two while, at the same time, problematizing the very notion of doing exactly that, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five 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.

Authors associated with historiographic metafiction