ABSTRACT
Susana Onega's subject here is the' eclosion of the historical novel in the late 1970s and 1980s'. Taking two generations of critically aware British novelists, Onega argues that British historiographic metafiction represents a specific and perhaps belated expression of a world-wide 'retreat into history' with its origins in North American 'fabulation' and Spanish-American 'magic realism'. For Onega, the scope of British historiographic metafiction in the last decade reflects a general subversion of Western rationality and its dualistic foundations, even if historiographic metafiction is obliged to resurrect certain forms of that dualism in the process of subversion. Onega acknowledges specific influences on historiographic metafiction from literary and cultural theory, notably the deconstructive contention that fiction and reality are not categorically distinct in the way that pre-modernist rationality demanded, and the Foucauldian or New Historicist idea that history has colluded with dualistic reason in suppressing or excluding mythical, esoteric and cabalistic elements with which rationality has always formed a union. This latter view leads Onega to argue that 'history' for historiographic metafiction is a pretext to enter a kind of time tunnel and rediscover suppressed histories in the process of redefining concepts of 'reality' and 'truth'. While much of the discussion here centres on the work of John Fowles, the value of Onega's piece is in surveying the scope of historiographic metafiction in contemporary British fiction.
