History, Time, and the Novel Since 1945

Drawing on the theory of history's recent 'temporal turn', this book offers a new account of the relationship between history and the novel in the postwar period

History, Time, and the Novel Since 1945 offers a new account of the relationship between history and the novel in the postwar period. The latter decades of the twentieth century saw many critics proclaim the ''end of history'', and many novelists turn to metafiction to demonstrate the difficulties of representing the historical past. This emphasis on history as a question of textual representation, however, has overlooked the ways in which novelists have engaged with history as an experience of time. Drawing on theorists of history''s recent ''temporal turn'', this book argues that the novel''s capacity to mediate experiences of time through form and style enables it to express the multiplicity of history temporalities through which historical change takes place. Ranging widely across British, American, African, and Caribbean literature, this book demonstrates that bringing close readings of style and form into dialogue with theorizations of historical time can provide a new account of what a historical novel can be.