I ground this reading of historiographic metafiction in a series of postmodern texts which work out of and subvert traditional notions of historical writing. I use Linda Hutcheon's construction of this postmodern genre to investigate the particular literary and historical strategies these texts use and abuse in order to write an alternative history. Beginning by reviewing the theory surrounding historical fiction as well as historiography, I investigate the specific textual strategies that historiographic genres-such as the postmodern novel, the Canadian long poem, the short story and to some extent, the film genre-use to present their self-reflexive interaction between history and fiction.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, University of Bamberg (Professur für Amerikanistik), course: American Historiographic Metafiction, language: English, abstract: The representation of history depends mainly on the perspective, attitude and cultural background of the beholder; which at the same time marks the major flaw of historiography. One topic or event will never be identically described by two historians, even if they are given the very same materials and sources to work with. As a consequence, historiography can only try to create an image, as true and original as possible, but is never able to depict everything that happened as it actually was in its full scope. So there were and always will be fictional elements and interpretations in the reports and writings about past events. This assumption leads us to historiographic metafiction, a style of writing that emerged during the postmodern era. If there is fiction in scholarly historiography, where is the difference between that and a novel that deals with history? This term paper will try to give an answer to that question and examine features and characteristics of historiographic metafiction, which eventually will be applied to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. In postmodern literature and, of course, especially in historiographic metafiction, authors tried to find new ways of telling stories and particularly representing history. I will take a closer look at the narrative frame and especially the concept of time Vonnegut used in the novel. But how is history represented in Slaughterhouse-Five? This will be the second part of the analysis that will attempt to find answers why Vonnegut wrote the novel the way he did. The third part will deal with intertextual elements in the novel. All citations from the novel and the pages indicated in brackets are taken from the edition cited below.

Can it be ever possible to write about war in a work of fiction? asks a protagonist of one of Makine’s strongly metafictional and intensely historical novels. Helena Duffy’s World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction redirects this question at the Franco-Russian author’s fiction itself by investigating its portrayal of Soviet involvement in the struggle against Hitler. To write back into the history of the Great Fatherland War its unmourned victims — invalids, Jews, POWs, women or starving Leningraders — is the self-acknowledged ambition of a novelist committed to the postmodern empowerment of those hitherto silenced by dominant historiographies. Whether Makine succeeds at giving voice to those whose suffering jarred with the triumphalist narrative of the war concocted by Soviet authorities is the central concern of Duffy’s book.

Providing detailed analysis of the recurrent structural and thematic traits in Peter Ackroyd's first nine novels, this work sets out to show how they grow out of the tension created by two apparently contradictory tendencies. These are, on the one hand, the metafictional tendency to blur the boundaries between story-telling and history, to enhance the linguistic component of writing, and to underline the constructedness of the world created in a way that aligns Ackroyd with other postmodernist writers of historiographic metafiction; and on the other, the attempt to achieve mythical closure, expressed, for example, in Ackroyd's fictional treatment of London as a mystic centre of power. This mythical element evinces the influence of high modernists such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and links Ackroyd's work to transition-to-postmodern writers such as Lawrence Durrell, Maureen Duffy, Doris Lessing and John Fowles.

Brenda Marshall engages with both literary texts and theory, providing an accessible and rigorous introduction to everything you wanted to know about postmodernism.

Contemporary writer Byatt uses the term heliotropic in two ways. First, it refers to her exploration and development of her own relation to the sun and to how her women characters experience adventures of the mind and feelings that bring them into the sun's light. Second, it refers to the fact that she suffers from seasonal affective disorder, and