Postmodern historiography in D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel and Martin Amis’s time’s arrow

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2016

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Nazlı, Elzem

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Postmodern historical fiction writers usually deviate from the traditional representation of past events. The aim of this thesis is to study the way history writing is reconfigured in two postmodern novels, D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981) and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991). In both novels the Holocaust plays an important part and both works transgress the expected characteristics of conventional historiography mainly through the use of metafictional techniques. However, the divergence from traditional representation in these novels foregrounds different concerns. In The White Hotel the Holocaust is used mainly to question the traditional understanding of history shaped by Enlightenment philosophy whereas in Time’s Arrow the Holocaust itself appears to be the primary concern rather than problematica of traditional historiography. Based on this distinction this study argues further that while D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel is a clear example of what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction” in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow does not fit equally well into this category since it does not engage in larger questions concerning the representation of the past and the attainability of truth.

Subject Keywords

Fiction, English literature

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http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12620300/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/26047

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

E. Nazlı, “Postmodern historiography in D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel and Martin Amis’s time’s arrow,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2016.