Elements of historiographical metafiction in Margaret Atwood’s ‘’the blind assassin’ and Martin Amis’ ‘’Time’s arrow’’: A comparative literary analysis

  • Dr Tapash Rudra Lincoln University College
Keywords: online book review publisher, research papers publisher, High impact factor journal, UGC approved journal, Dr Tapash Rudra, Elements of historiographical metafiction in Margaret Atwood’s ‘’the blind assassin’ and Martin Amis’ ‘’Time’s arrow’’: A comparative literary analysis

Abstract

Historiography is the study of history as a discipline. This evaluates the methodological and epistemological aspects during the course of history or historical manifestations of a specific era. However, the past could not be proclaimed only by means of a simple narrative. In reality, the metafiction illustrates the way of reconstructing and rewriting the historical incidents. It virtually uncovers the various facets of a historical era as it not only confines itself within the dry historical facts, rather it rejuvenates the monumental events that took place and how they eventually affected the memoir of the personal belief and emotion of the people. In this work, I chose two completely different novels as far as their historical background is concerned, however, gender discrimination at the social hierarchy and classism have always been existing, both during peace and crisis, as I intricate and compare the flow of both the novels. I tried to analyze both the novels with utter importance from the historiographical point of view so as to propel them into metafictional elements and make sure how they could be brought into public perspective. Moreover, I went in depth of the theoretical aspect of both the novels and emphasized on literary techniques that have been employed to manifest how these novels are extremely adequate to portray ‘’historiographical metafiction’’.

Keywords: Historiography, Metafiction, Post-modernism, Memoir, Holocaust

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Dr Tapash Rudra, Lincoln University College

Dr Tapash Rudra, PhD in Biotechnology, is an Associate Professor, Dept. of Biotechnology and Post Graduate Coordinator for Faculty of Science, with Lincoln University College, Malaysia. He has served as a lecturer with many institutions and is a widely published author.

References

1. Hollinger, Veronica. “Apocalypse Coma.” Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation. Eds Veronica Hollinger and Joan Gordon. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002. 159-173.
2. Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. London: Verso, 1998.
3. Berger, James. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.
4. Parry, Ann. “The Caesura of the Holocaust in Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader.” Journal of European Studies 29 (1999): 249-67.
5. McCarthy, Dermot. “The Limits of Irony: The Chronillogical World of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow.” War, Literature and the Arts 11 (1999): 294-320.
6. Weiss, Allan. “The Canadian Apocalypse.” Worlds of Wonder: Readings in Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. In Jean-François Leroux and Camille R. La Bossière, eds. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2004. 35-46.
7. White, Hayden. “Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground.” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 230-60. PDF.
8. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination of Nineteenth-Century Europe. 1973. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. Google Book Search. Web. 23 Feb. 2016.
9. “The Modernist Event.” Figural Realism: Studies in Mimesis Effect. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Print.
10. McGlothin, Erin. “Theorizing the Perpetrator in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow.” After Representation? The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture. Ed. R. Clifton Spargo and Robert M. Ehrenreich. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010. 210-230. Print.
11. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Print.
12. Assmann, Aleida. “Canon and Archive.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. 97-107. E-book.
13. Erll, Astrid. “Cultural Memory Studies: An Introduction.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. 1-15. E-book.
14. Neumann, Birgit. “The Literary Representation of Memory.” Cultural Memory Studies: A Literary and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. 333-43. E-book.
15. Rigney, Ann. “All This Happened, More or Less: What a Novelist Made of the Bombing of Dresden.” History and Theory 47 (2009): 5-24. Web. 13 Mar. 2015. −−−. “Fiction as Mediator of National Remembrance.” Narrating the Nation: Representation in History, the Media and the Arts. Eds. Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas, and Andrew Mycock. New York: Berghahn, 2008. 79-96. Google Book Search. Web. 23 Feb. 2016.
16. Staels, Hilde. “Atwood’s Specular Narrative: The Blind Assassin.” English Studies 85.2 (2004): 147-60. Web. 7 Feb. 2016.
17. “Herodotus.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2016. Web. 30 Mar. 2016.
18. Amis, Martin. Einstein’s Monsters. New York: Harmony, 1987. ---. Time’s Arrow, or, The Nature of the Offense. New York: Vintage International, 1991.
19. Granofsky, Ronald. The Trauma Novel: Contemporary Symbolic Depictions of Collective Disaster. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.
20. Amis, Martin. Interview. “Guardian book club podcast: John Mullan meets Martin Amis.” The Guardian, 28 Jun. 2010. Web. 10 Aug. 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books /video/2010/feb/01/book-club-martin amis-times-arrow
21. Amis, Martin. “The D. M. Thomas Phenomenon.” The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000. London: Vintage, 2002. 141-145. Print.
22. Amis, Martin. The Zone of Interest. Novel. London: Cape, 2014. Print.
23. Amis, Martin. Time’s Arrow. New York: Harmony, 1991. Print.
24. Heiler, Lars. “The Holocaust and Aesthetic Transgression in Contemporary British Fiction.” Taboo and Transgression in British Fiction from the Renaissance and to the Present. Ed. Stefan Horlacher, Stefan Glomb, and Lars Heiler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.
25. Nünning, Ansgar. “Crossing Borders and Blurring Genres: Towards a Typology and Poetics of Postmodernist Historical Fiction in England since the 1960’s.” European Journal of English Studies 1.2 (1997): 217-238. Print.
Published
2019-02-05
How to Cite
Rudra, D. T. “Elements of Historiographical Metafiction in Margaret Atwood’s ‘’the Blind assassin’ and Martin Amis’ ‘’Time’s arrow’’: A Comparative Literary Analysis”. Contemporary Literary Review India, Vol. 6, no. 1, Feb. 2019, pp. 59-86, https://literaryjournal.in/index.php/clri/article/view/128.
Section
Research Papers