Neo-historical Fiction, Material Realism and the Poetics of the Inventory
In the wake of recent developments propounded by influential specialists (Bentley, Boxall, Wilson), this article considers that even if 21st-Century historical fiction jettisons some of the reflexivity and irony that it took on board in the late 20th century, notably through a poetics associated wit...
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| Udgivet i: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Sprog: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2025
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| Online adgang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | In the wake of recent developments propounded by influential specialists (Bentley, Boxall, Wilson), this article considers that even if 21st-Century historical fiction jettisons some of the reflexivity and irony that it took on board in the late 20th century, notably through a poetics associated with postmodernism, its return to what may appear as traditional forms does not imply “a return to an older, more secure form of history” (Boxall). It is rife with ethical concerns and resonates with the novelist’s “responsibility to [historical]truth” (Wood). In other terms, this article argues that, with the demise of the cultural and linguistic turns, and with the advent of the material turn, the responsibility to truth has come to rely on the consideration of material forces. In Boxall’s terms, « [t]he novel is driven by the desire to penetrate the truth of the past, the past as material history rather than as narrative invention. » The article takes its lead from the preceding statement and will consider the way in which, in a spate of contemporary British neo-historical novels, the traces of the past are consigned in a poetic and a logic of the inventory, in which note-taking and “rag-picking” (Benjamin, Onega) constitute a practice of and a pre-condition for the elaboration of narrative. Through the means of the elementary grammar of the inventory, the texts that the presentation addresses (Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to Begin, Sarah Hall’s Haweswater, Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier) feature elements like the collection of data that pre-dates the elaboration of a narrative. In doing so, they rely on a poetics and ethics of the ordinary. By taking on board basic elements of material realism, such novels try to come as close as possible to historical truth, introducing material and bodily experience (the narrator’s, the readers’) into the heart of the neo-historical narrative. |
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