Telling Histories: Narrativizing History, Historicizing Literature

by Susana Ónega (Editor)

The proliferation of historical novels with more or less overt metafictional traits in the late seventies and eighties in Britain is a particularly arresting phenomenon at a time when historians are openly questioning the validity of the traditional concept of history understood as a scientific search for knowledge. This apparent contradiction justifies the attempt made by the contributors of this volume to analize the relationship between history and literature in English. The reader will find four preliminary essays on The End of the Classical Period establishing the characteristics of the appropriation of history since the appearance of Sir Walter Scott's historical romances with special emphasis on the Victorian novel (Dickens, Eliot, Mrs Humphry Ward), the Irish ballad and Post-Independence Indian historical fiction, as a necessary preface to the main group of essays on The Postmodernist Era devoted to establishing the common as well as the individually distinctive traits in the writings of some of the most accomplished contemporary writers in the more centered British novelists Margaret Drabble, Julian Barnes and William Golding as well as the more ex-centric Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson plus the playwright Caryl Churchill, and the black American novelist David Bradley.

Paperback

First published June 1, 1995

About the author

Susana Onega is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Zaragoza and a member of the Academia Europaea. She has written extensively on contemporary British literature, narrative poetics, ethics and trauma.