Historiographic metafiction
A postmodern genre fusing self-reflexive fiction with historical events.
Historiographic metafiction mixes self-aware storytelling with historical fiction. Canadian theorist Linda Hutcheon named it in the late 1980s. The genre is tied to postmodern literature, most often novels.
Quick Facts
- Field
- Literary theory
Facts from the source article.
Concept
This genre combines metafiction with historical fiction and is marked by frequent intertextual allusions to other artistic, historical, and literary texts, demonstrating how literature and historiography depend on the history of discourse. According to Hutcheon's "A Poetics of Postmodernism", these works are both intensely self-reflexive and lay claim to historical events and personages. The genre parodies other forms, using and abusing them so that each parody critiques and problematizes them, a process identified as subversion that exposes suppressed histories and redefines reality and truth.
Examples
In her essay "Historiographic Metafiction", Linda Hutcheon first cited The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Name of the Rose, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Ragtime as examples, then broke down elements using V., Song of Solomon, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, and several of John Barth's novels. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five represents actual World War II events while problematizing that representation, offering a metafictional, "Janus-headed" perspective. Literary scholar Bran Nicol noted that Vonnegut's novel has "a more directly political edge to metafiction" compared to works by Robert Coover, John Barth, and Vladimir Nabokov.
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