Historiographic Metafiction (USA)

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Kurt Müller (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Domains

Literary Concept

Dates

Date of occurrence 1960

Places

Canada (Location)
United States (Location)

Genres and Modes

Prose Fiction Narrative

Resources

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The powerful re-emergence of the historical novel, a genre initially launched by Sir Walter Scott’s

Waverley

(1814), has been one of the most remarkable phenomena in recent literature. From its beginnings in the early nineteenth century, the genre had been under attack from both historians and literary critics as a “bastard art” for its supposedly “impure” mix of the fictitious and the historical. Yet it is exactly this mix and the contested relationship between the two that is the central concern of historiographic metafiction.

In the context of contemporary postmodernism, historiographic metafiction can be seen as part of the general phenomenon of metafiction that rose in the 1960s and 1970s as a reaction against modernism and realism. Metafiction, a term coined in 1970 by the

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3509 words

Citation: Müller, Kurt. "Historiographic Metafiction (USA)". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 22 November 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1512, accessed 22 November 2024.]