Historiographic metafiction is a genre of writing that incorporatesmetafiction intohistorical fiction.[1] The term was coined byCanadianliterary theoristLinda Hutcheon in the late 1980s.[2]
The genre is fiction which combines the literary device ofmetafiction withhistorical fiction. Works regarded as historiographic metafiction are also distinguished by frequent allusions to other artistic, historical and literary texts (i.e.,intertextuality) in order to show the extent to which works of both literature andhistoriography are dependent on the history of discourse.[3]
Although Hutcheon said that historiographic metafiction is not another version of thehistorical novel, there are scholars (e.g.,Monika Fludernik) who describe it as such, citing that it is simply an updated late-twentieth-century version of the genre for its embrace of the conceptualizations of the novel and of the historical in the twentieth century.[2]
The term is closely associated with works ofpostmodern literature, usually novels. According to Hutcheon's "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".[1] This is demonstrated in the genres that historiographic metafiction parodies, which it uses and abuses so that each parody constitutes a critique in the way it problematizes them.[4] This process is also identified as "subversion" for the purpose of exposing suppressed histories to allow the redefinition of reality and truth.[5]
When devising the categorisation in her essay "Historiographic Metafiction",Linda Hutcheon first citedThe French Lieutenant's Woman (1969),The Name of the Rose (1981),One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) andRagtime (1975) as examples, then breaking down the elements usingV. (1963),Song of Solomon (1977),Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969) as well as multiple ofJohn Barth's novels:The Floating Opera (1956),The End of the Road (1958) andThe Sot-Weed Factor (1960).[1]
By seeking to represent bothactual historical events fromWorld War II while, at the same time,problematizing the very notion of doing exactly that,Kurt Vonnegut'sSlaughterhouse-Five (1969) features a metafictional, "Janus-headed" perspective.[6] Literary scholar Bran Nicol argues that Vonnegut's novel features "a more directly political edge to metafiction" compared to the writings ofRobert Coover, John Barth, andVladimir Nabokov.[7]
