Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing by Ann Heilmann , Mark Llewellyn (review)

Abstract

206Reviews awkwardly appended, while Raine airbrushes out Eliot's rhymes about King Bolo and his big black queen. What Eliot needs now is a sympathetic critical biography that is addressed to the unconverted. Pithy, provocative, donnishly brilliant, Raine's is toomuch an insider's book. University of St Andrews Robert Crawford Metafictionand Metahistory inContemporary Women'sWriting.Edited byAnn Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007. 48.00. xi + 222 pp. isbn: 978-0-230-00504-4. Since the late 1980s,historyhas emerged as an increasinglyprominent theme incontem porarywriting, and historical literature ? a genre once dismissed as escapist pap ? has discovered a new critical and cultural respectability: what was 'then' is very 'now'. Heilmann and Llewellyn's timely collection of essays considers what is specific about how contemporary women writers represent history.Their clear and purposeful intro duction, oudining the aims and content of the volume, is followed by fourteen lively chapters thatdiscuss textsfrom North America, Australia, and the UK. Essays on canon icalwriters (Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt,JeanetteWinterson) are interwovenwith discus sions of established but neglected authors (Stevie Davies, Eva Figes, Rose Tremain, Michele Roberts, Daphne Marlatt), lesser known figures (BetsyTobin, Susan Kenney, Moy McCrory), and thosewhose work has appeared more recendy (AliceThompson, Sena JeterNaslund, Sarah Waters). As this listof names indicates, one of the strengths of thevolume lies in its scope; the essays cover popular and literarytextsand consider the representation of a range of differenthistorical periods, expanding the current critical focus on neo-Victorian literature. This scope is compromised to some degree by the inclusion of two essays on Carter. Moreover, while essays on Canadian and Australian fictionhelp togive thevolume an international dimension, furtherdiscussion of postcolonial writing and an exploration of race and ethnicity would have enabled the collection to reflecta greater plurality of historical voices. Working within the context of postmodern and feminist reconceptions of history,many of the essays employ a similar critical framework, one indebted to Adrienne Rich's notion of revision, Linda Hutcheon's definition of historio graphic metafiction, and Julia Kristeva's theory ofWomen's Time. They also cover established themes: history as a patriarchal narrative that excludes and silences female subjects; the past and literary classics (Melville's Moby Dick, de Sade's Justine, and Yeats's poetry) rewritten from a woman-centred perspective; the challenge posed to the authority and authenticity of official historical records; history as a discursive construct; the relationship between fact and fiction; and the uncertainty of historical truth. The theoretical and thematic links between chapters give the volume coherence without suppressing critical debate, and, despite a conscious effort tomake connections between the essays, some interesting and productive tensions emerge. For example, while Sherry Booth celebrates 'the role of the imagination in the creation of true stories, of YES, 39.1 & 2, 2009 207 accurate histories' (p. 45), the historian Katharine Hodgkin expresses concern about the historical accuracy of speculative fiction, highlighting a tendency for anachronism and ahistoricism. Further, while there is an acknowledgement that historical writing bywomen isnot a new genre, there isno consensus about what distinguishes contemporary women writers' engagement with history from that of theirmale peers and female predecessors. Some of the essays stress connec tions between contemporary writers and their historical antecedents (Caryl Churchill and the early nineteenth-century Scottish playwright Joanne Baillie, for example); others identify in contemporary writing a greater focus on gender, an emphasis on the fluidity of gender boundaries, the use of fairy-tale motifs, the recuperation of what has been edited out of dominant versions of the past ? domesticity, the body, desire, particularly same-sex desire (represented in Winterson, Marlatt, Waters) ? and self-reflexive intertextuality. Such points of difference only enrich the volume as a whole. As contemporary women writers' continuing preoccupation with the past demonstrates, history is far from over. By oudining key debates and critical issues, this lucid and illuminating collection of essays considers how and why women reimagine (literary) history, underlining the ways in which gender is significant to an understanding of the present as well as the past. University of Leicester Emma Parker ...