Private, public and historical sphere – in Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the museum

Abstract

The role of material culture in fiction has been given relatively little attention within the field of literary studies. This is surprising, since fiction provides interesting and at times revealing clues with regard to the way people experience the world and make sense of it. From this point of view, contemporary ’postmodern’ fiction especially seems worth exploring. Kate Atkinson’s novel is ’popular’ in the sense that it deals with themes that are common and close to ’ordinary’ British (English) people: it explores family ties, the encounters of generations and the over-all relations to the past, the present and the future. But at the same time it is also a highly complex and self-reflective ’postmodern’ novel, which is likely to reveal something in relation to the academic discourses that it has been influenced by. Although fictive worlds are undeniably fictive and personal constructions by the authors, they nevertheless mirror something of the contexts of their production, the contemporary social realities in which the texts are born. The following is a case study of a fictional process, in which the protagonist Ruby is attempting to make sense of her life, and in so doing, weaving ’words and things’ into a personal ’heritage narrative’ that combines both private and public elements.