Editing Historiographic metafiction

{{Short description|Postmodern literary genre}}'''Historiographic metafiction''' is a term coined by [[Canadians|Canadian]] [[Literary theory|literary theorist]] [[Linda Hutcheon]] in the late 1980s. It incorporates three domains: [[fiction]], [[history]], and [[theory]].<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=Trading Magic for Fact, Fact for Magic: Myth and Mythologizing in Postmodern Canadian Historical Fiction|last=Colavincenzo|first=Marc|date=2003|publisher=Rodopi|isbn=90-420-0936-5|location=Amsterdam|pages=45}}</ref>

== 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 (i.e., [[intertextuality]]) in order to show the extent to which works of both literature and [[historiography]] are dependent on the history of discourse.<ref name="bolland">{{cite book|last1=Bolland|first1=John|title=Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient: A Reader's Guide|date=2002|publisher=Continuum|location=London, UK|isbn=978-0-8264-5243-6|page=54}}</ref>

Although Hutcheon said that historiographic metafiction is not another version of the [[Historical fiction|historical novel]], there are scholars (e.g., [[Monika Fludernik]]) 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.<ref name=":0" />

The term is closely associated with works of [[postmodern literature]], usually novels. According to Hutcheon's "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".<ref name="Hutcheon5">Hutcheon 5</ref> 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 problematizes them.<ref>{{Cite book|title=World War II in Andreï Makine's Historiographic Metafiction: 'No One Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Forgotten'|last=Duffy|first=Helena|date=2018|publisher=BRILL|isbn=978-90-04-36231-4|location=Leiden|pages=12}}</ref> This process is also identified as "subversion" for the purpose of exposing suppressed histories to allow the redefinition of reality and truth.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Metafiction|last=Currie|first=Mark|date=2013|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-0-582-21292-3|location=New York|pages=92}}</ref>

== Examples ==
Works often described as examples of historiographic metafiction include: ''[[Doctor Copernicus]]'' by [[John Banville]] (1976), ''[[The French Lieutenant's Woman]]'' by [[John Fowles]] (1969), ''[[Ragtime (novel)|Ragtime]]'' by [[E. L. Doctorow]] (1975), ''[[Legs (novel)|Legs]]'' by [[William Kennedy (author)|William Kennedy]] (1975), ''[[Kindred (novel)|Kindred]]'' by [[Octavia E. Butler]] (1979), ''[[Midnight's Children]]'' by [[Salman Rushdie]] (1981), ''[[The Great Indian Novel]]'' by [[Shashi Tharoor]]  (1989), ''[[Possession (Byatt novel)|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|Kurt Vonnegut's]] ''[[Slaughterhouse-Five]]'' (1969) features a metafictional, "[[Janus|Janus-headed]]" perspective.<ref name="jensen">Jensen, Mikkel (2016) "[http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00144940.2015.1133546 Janus-Headed Postmodernism: The Opening Lines of ''Slaughterhouse-Five'']" in ''[[The Explicator]]'', 74:1, 8-11.</ref> 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]].<ref>Bran Nicol. ''The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 86.</ref>

==References==
{{Reflist}}

===Works cited===
*[http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/Literary_Criticism/postmodernism/Hutcheon_outline.html "Historiographic Metafiction: 'The Pastime of Past time'"] from [[Fu Jen Catholic University]]
* [https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/10252/1/TSpace0167.pdf Hutcheon, Linda: ''Historiographic Metafiction. Parody and the Intertextuality of History'']
*Hutcheon, Linda. ''A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction''. New York: 1988.
*Kotte, Christina: ''Ethical Dimensions in British Historiographic Metafiction: Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Penelope Lively''. Trier: 2002, (''Studies in English Literary and Cultural History'', 2), {{ISBN|3-88476-486-1}}.
{{Historiography}}
[[Category:Metafiction]]
[[Category:Historiography]]
[[Category:Literary criticism]]