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Historiographic metafiction
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This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (April 2006) |
Historiographic metafiction is a term originally coined by Linda Hutcheon.
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". Historiographic metafiction is a quintessentially postmodern art form, with a reliance upon textual play, parody and historical re-conceptualization. Rather than viewing history as a transcendent or wholly definable object of inquiry or representation, historiographic metafiction sees engagements with history as necessarily being discursive, situational, and above all, textual. These (re)visions to history allow for new perspectives and identities to rise out of culturally marginalized positions. While at once being eminently political, historiographic metafiction problematizes categories of essential unity and historical representation.
One author often associated with historiographic metafiction is Michael Ondaatje, in works such as Running in the Family, In the Skin of a Lion, The English Patient, and Coming Through Slaughter. Salman Rushdie's novels Shame and Midnight's Children can also be regarded as historiographic metafiction in their re-writing of the history of Pakistan and India in the early- and mid-twentieth century.
Definition of Metafiction at Emory.edu An example of historiographic metafiction is Daphne Marlatt's novel _Ana Historic_. It is the process of re-writing history through a work of fiction in a way that has not been previously recorded. In Marlatt's novel, this is achieved through journal entries of a fictional character who represents a form of reality for women both in the past and in the present. Often, historiographic metafiction refers to the loss of the feminine voice in history. Erin Mouré's poetry broaches this subject.