ABSTRACT
Raymond Mazurek's analysis of The Public Burning clearly influenced Linda Hutcheon's account of Postmodernism in A Poetics of Postmodernism (see section 2 of this volume). According to Mazurek, Coover's novel is one in a wave of new historical novels, most of which appeared in the 1970s, which aimed to challenge the empirical concepts of history, and to conceive of history instead as a kind of discourse. In this respect, Mazurek's analysis can be compared to Onega's 'British Historiographic Metafiction' (Chapter 5) which identifies the same tendency in the British novel of the 1980s. Mazurek's interest is in the juxtaposition of metafictional techniques with historical content as a way of staging a paradox in what he calls the 'structuralist model of history': that history is at the same time 'real' and 'discursive'. This model of history, brought to light by commentators such as Hayden White during the 1970s in North America (see Part Two), is the nonfictional correlative of historiographic metafiction. Taken together, these attitudes to history represent an assault on the boundary between history and fiction. In this context, Mazurek claims that The Public Burning brings into focus the textual form of history. Thus the years of Nixon's presidency are used by Coover as a way of blurring the distinction between the empirical events of history and their representation in discourses such as novels and newspapers, thereby foregrounding certain problems of historical interpretation.
