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The Return of the Historical Novel ? Metafiction andrew james johnston johnston · wiegandt johnston kai wiegandt Editors The Return of the Historical Thinking Novel ? (Eds.) About Fiction and History johnston · wiegandt (Eds.) After Historiographic The Return of the Historical Novel ? Metafiction ntil recently, the critical reception of historical fiction was dominated by two theoretical paradigms: György Lukács’s Marxist view and Linda Hutcheon’s concept of ‘historiographic of the Historical Novel The Return metafiction’. We are now entering a new phase as the discussion of the historical novel is rapidly becoming more inclusive, more tolerant and, above all, more diverse. It is before the backdrop of these changes in the critical debate that the contributions to this volume are meant to be read. Rather than seeing historical fiction as locked in a clear-cut scheme of teleological succession or assigning to the historical novel specific aesthetic purposes, the articles in this collection seek to probe deeply into the his- torical novel’s potential for providing readers not simply with an understanding of how the image of the past is constructed but also of how attempts to chart forms of historical otherness constitute a specific mode of cultural experience mediated by literature. This desire for a literary experience of historical ? otherness has recently increased in urgency, even if the histori- cal authenticity one might nostalgically associate with such a project must always elude us. Authors discussed include Walter Scott, John Fowles, Graham Swift, M. J. Vassanji, J. M. Coetzee, Peter Ackroyd, Alan Massie, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Hilary Mantel and Jim Crace. Universitätsverlag winter isbn 978-3-8253-6721-3 Heidelberg britannica et americana Dritte Folge · Band 33 herausgegeben von wolfram r. keller andrew james johnston The Return of the Historical Novel ? Thinking About Fiction and History After Historiographic Metafiction Edited by andrew james johnston kai wiegandt Universitätsverlag winter Heidelberg Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. cover illustration Tommy Atkins and his mates return from Dunkirk. Frank Capra (still from Why We Fight) isbn 978-3-8253-6721-3 Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. © 2017 Universitätsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg Imprimé en Allemagne · Printed in Germany Gedruckt auf umweltfreundlichem, chlorfrei gebleichtem und alterungsbeständigem Papier. Den Verlag erreichen Sie im Internet unter: www.winter-verlag.de Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introduction Andrew James Johnston, Kai Wiegandt 9 Scott-land and the Invention of the Historical Novel: Walter Scott’s Waverley Cordula Lemke 19 Neo-Victorian Novels: Staging Historicity in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman Claudia Olk 31 Historiographic Metafiction and the History of Nature: John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Graham Swift’s Waterland Ute Berns 47 The Production of History: M. G. Vassanji’s Postcolonial Historical Novel on the Indian Ocean Rim Russell West-Pavlov 73 History as Struggle of Generations: J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg Kai Wiegandt 87 Figurations of Authorship in Postmodern Historical Fiction Helga Schwalm 105 History, the Contemporary, and Life in Time: Timescapes in Ian McEwan’s and Julian Barnes’s Novels Heike Hartung 119 Atonement – Ian McEwanʼs Canterbury Tale? Andrew James Johnston 145 Thomas Cromwell, Our Contemporary: The Poetics of Subjective Experience as Intersubjective Ethics in Wolf Hall Renate Brosch 163 6 ‘There’ll just be progress of a sort’: Elegizing the Historical Novel in Jim Crace’s Harvest Margitta Rouse 185 Biographical Notes 205 Index 207 Acknowledgements We would like to thank Winfried Fluck, Therese Fuhrer, Ursula Kocher, Joachim Küpper, Ansgar Nünning, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Stefan Willer and all contributors to this volume for their enthusiastic participation in the lecture series on the Historical Novel at Freie Universität Berlin in the Summer Term 2011. We are grateful to Wolfram R. Keller for his editorial advice and support, and to Elena Radwan and Dilan Güngör for their invaluable help in preparing the manuscript. Last but not least, many thanks are due to Martin Bleisteiner, Sven Durie and Jan-Peer Hartmann for their support throughout this undertaking. Berlin, August 2016 Andrew James Johnston and Kai Wiegandt A N D R E W J A M E S J OHNSTON , K A I W IEGANDT Introduction The historical novel is marked by a chequered critical history. As a genre, it has been haunted by what one might, half-seriously stealing from Derrida, call “The Spectre of Lukácsˮ. Few other theorists have been as influential as the twentieth-century Hun- garian Marxist in shaping our critical perception of historical fiction. Arguably, there is only one other theoretical approach that can be said to rival Lukács in its influence on our views of the historical novel, and that is the concept of ‘historiographic meta- fictionʼ, a notion introduced by the Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon in 1988. Until fairly recently, it was these two perspectives that all but dominated attempts to conceptualize the genre. But things seem to be changing: the last decade or so has seen the advent of new ways of thinking about the historical novel. It is in the freshly developing discus- sion of the genre that this volume seeks to participate. György/Georg Lukácsʼs Marxist view sees the historical novel in very specific ideo- logical terms and, consequently, affords it a very particular – and surprisingly brief – space in literary history. Central to Lukácsʼs unabashedly teleological scheme of things, set down most comprehensively in his monograph The Historical Novel (1937), is a narrative of origins. The historical novel in its ʻtrue senseʼ was invented by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), with Waverley (1814) constituting the first example. But after little more than two decades, according to Lukács, the genreʼs most salient features were already being absorbed into the social realism of Honoré de Balzac. Hence, the histori- cal novel as one would commonly understand it, that is a novel set in the (distant) past, effectively became obsolete. From Balzac (1799-1850) onwards, historical fiction was drained of its aesthetic and intellectual relevance since the genreʼs central principles as developed by Scott migrated into the kind of realism cultivated in the bourgeois novel. For, as Lukács argues, the historical novelʼs particular legitimacy in history derives from the genreʼs capacity for imaginatively analyzing the ways in which a given pe- riodʼs social conditions shape human experience. And this capacity is best expressed when the genre deals with eras marked by momentous change and cataclysmic rupture: “the portrayal of a total context of social life, be it present or past, in narrative formˮ (Lukács, The Historical Novel 242). The historical novelʼs realism is encapsulated, in an especially poignant fashion, in the typical construction of its protagonists whom Lukács has famously called – rather unflatteringly – “mediocre heroesˮ. Instead of employing the great personalities from history – e.g. Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon – as the central stars of its cast, the historical novel as invented by Scott uses utterly fictitious characters as its protagonists. Their lives are powerfully affected by the historical developments depicted, but this always happens in a manner supposedly characteristic of their times. 10 Introduction Thus, the protagonistsʼ actions have next to no impact on the general course of histor- ical events. Indeed, the protagonists in question are made to look rather ordinary – hence their supposed mediocrity: fairly intelligent and usually endowed with more than a modicum of ethical sensibilities, but without being in any way special: “as central fig- ures they provide a perfect instrument for Scottʼs way of presenting the totality of cer- tain transitional stages of historyˮ (Lukács, The Historical Novel 35). Paradoxically, Lukácsʼs teleological account of the genre’s absorption into Balzac’s social realism results in the historical novelʼs abandoning of what one would conven- tionally assume to be the ʻhistoricalʼ: the genreʼs link to periods set in the (distant) past. As displayed by Balzacʼs fiction, the historical novelʼs capacity for representing and analyzing the social imprint on human experience was being further refined by novels narrating contemporary, or at least, near-contemporary events: “The classical historical novel arose out of the social novel and, having enriched and raised it to a higher level, passed back into itˮ (Lukács, The Historical Novel 242). From a Marxist point of view, novels clearly set in the past, in periods untouched by living memory, were thus ren- dered superfluous. Little wonder then that after 1848, the year that saw the failure of so many of Europeʼs democratic bourgeois revolutions, the historical novel purportedly entered a period of rapid decline – and the bourgeois realism Lukács sets so much store on was soon to follow suit. Indeed, as Lukács argued, the actual emergence
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