Abstract

Clio's Fictions examines the relation between the construction of history and the function of narrative in ordering and giving meaning to experience, with a primary focus on the works of Walter Pater in the context of nineteenth-century theories of history and historiography. "Part One" explores the interconnections between historical and fictional narrative, first from a theoretical perspective and then through textual analyses of the narrative interaction between myth and history in Genesis and of the structural and conceptual relation between Thucydides' History and Homer's Iliad. The main portion of the dissertation, "Part Two," considers the development in Pater's historical thought from the relativism and scepticism of The Renaissance to a sense of history in Pater's later works that allows for an imaginative reconstruction of the past. Chapter One of this part discusses the theory of history conveyed by the essentially non-narrative structure of The Renaissance in connection with the "philosophy of the moment" presented in the "Conclusion" and its terms of Pater's notion of aesthetic education. Chapter Two analyzes Pater's search for what I call an adequate myth of order, first in the fictions of Marius the Epicurean and the "Imaginary Portraits" and then in Pater's return to explicit historical reconstruction in Plato and Platonism. I argue, however, that Pater's irony and scepticism never allow him to forget that such a reconstruction is possible only in a fiction, and here the relation of history to fiction--the relation that underlies the initial development, indeed the very possibility, of historical writing--becomes crucial in my analysis of Pater. For, where early historiography drew history from the constructs of fiction, Pater in many ways re-draws history as fiction, as a necessary fiction of order. A necessary fiction of order is the focus of "Part Three," which returns to the larger context established in "Part One," first by looking back to Virgil's creation of a fiction of order in the Aeneid and then forward to T. S. Eliot's construction of "Tradition" from the fragments of myth. Finally, I return to the theoretical issues with which I began in order to consider the possibilities for historical representation in terms of plausibility as a measure of the validity of historical explanation and in terms of the role of interpretation and evaluation in history