ABSTRACT
John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman is often seen as the first British historiographic metafiction (see Onega in Part Two of this volume), though it could be argued that certain Modernist novels - Joyce's Ulysses or Woolf's Orlando - were exploring the paradoxes of fictional history long before. This study of Fowles's 'modern novel about a Victorian novel' analyses the way that fictionality can be exposed without being destroyed, the interweaving of historical and literary sources, and the paradoxes generated by a godlike author who attempts to bestow freedom on his own characters. The analysis illustrates many of the characteristics considered definitive of meta fiction by the essays in this volume, notably the ability of a novel to become what Barth calls 'a metaphor for itself' (Part Three) and the persistent contradiction of history as real and discursive, as advanced by Hutcheon, Onega and White (Part Two).
