Abstract

Against Linda Hutcheon's influential labeling of the late twentieth-century novel that challenges the authority of traditionalist historiography as "historiographic metafiction," thereby foregrounding an untenable distinction between fiction and history, this dissertation proposes that the contemporary "historical" novel that questions history is, rather, metahistoriographic, in that it interrogates the writing of history from the poststructuralist stance of refusing, with Paul de Man, to privilege the truth claims of history over fiction. Acknowledging with Michel Foucault, as well as with Jean-Francois Lyotard and Francesco Bonami, the inadequacy of conventional historiographic methodology, this study offers a poststructuralist reading of eight British historical novels of the 1980s and 1990s as histories of difference. ;Specifically, through its consideration of four categorical imperatives of conventional historiographic epistemology---mimesis, agency, narrativity, and origin---chapter one develops a theoretical strategy, based largely on the texts of Foucault, with which to read the metahistoriographic novels in the subsequent chapters. Beginning with Foucault's appropriation of Nietzsche's problematizing of history, the study examines these historiographic preconditions with reference to Foucault's archaeological, genealogical, and power/knowledge texts. To consider further the interdependence of narrativity and meaning, which Foucault addresses as the problem of teleology, the dissertation employs Hayden White's distinction between narrated and narrativized texts. The study recognizes Dominick LaCapra's problematizing of documentary sources as an additional theoretical context for Foucault's interrogation of origin. ;Chapter two considers Beryl Bainbridge's The Birthday Boys and Jeanette Winterson's The Passion as poststructuralist challenges to the hierarchy of mimetic representation. The degree to which the human subject possesses the capacity to exercise historical agency is questioned in chapter three through readings of two Holocaust novels, D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel and Martin Amis' Time's Arrow . The production of meaning through narrativization is examined in chapter four with respect to Graham Swift's Waterland and Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10½ Chapters . Chapter five demonstrates through a consideration of A. S. Byatt's Possession and Swift's Ever After ways in which documentary sources are always already mediated. The dissertation concludes with a reading of Edmund Morris' Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan as a poststructuralist history of difference, collapsing the epistemological boundaries of history and fiction