The Historical Imagination: Postmodernism and the Treatment of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction by Frederick M. Holmes

Abstract

ESC 26, 2000 321). Although Rossetti might not have liked the idea, it is the “devilish” aspects of her devotional prose — the unortho­ dox, nontraditional, whimsical, and profoundly eccentric — that will appeal to many of her readers today. Kent and Stanwood’s Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti is a splendid start in the vital process of making this non-prosaic prose available to the poet’s readers. MARY WILSON CARPENTER / Queen’s University Frederick M. Holmes. The Historical Imagination: Postmod­ ernism and the Treatment of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction. Victoria: English Literary Studies, 1997. 96. ELS Mono­ graph Series, No. 73. This brief study of a small group of contemporary British nov­ els is a useful but oddly conceived addition to work in a field that is still only gradually attracting sustained panoptic at­ tention. Articles and books on individual novels and novelists from the 1980s and 1990s are now quite common, but studies of contemporary British fiction that attempt a more overarching view are still relatively rare, although certainly becoming less so. This book falls somewhat ill-definedly between the general and the particular in that it addresses itself to broad questions applicable to a great many contemporary novels, British and otherwise, but limits itself to close study of only eight: John Fowles, A Maggot (1985); Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton (1987); Nigel Williams, Star Turn (1985); Jeanette Winterson, The Passion (1987); Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 102 Chapters (1989); A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (1990); Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger (1987); and Graham Swift, Ever After (1992). Parts of three previously published articles (on the Swift, Byatt, and Fowles novels) have been incorporated into the present study, so that some of this synthetic analysis has its origins in these earlier discussions of the individual texts. The logic behind the choice of these specific novels is not altogether clear. The “historical imagination” each exhibits is the notional thread that connects them, along with their status 234 REVIEWS as postmodernist texts much given to examining their own on­ tological states and, by extension, the broader relationship of history to fiction in a speculative world that privileges notions of radical relativism. But these are characteristic preoccupations of a large number of recent novels. It is difficult for such a short book with such a circumscribed number of core texts to avoid giving the impression that arbitrariness (particularly the length restrictions placed on submissions to the ELS Monograph Se­ ries) and professional convenience made as great a contribution to the decisions that went into its shaping as genuine argumen­ tative design. The book is structured into five chapters, with each chap­ ter examining the same novels in the light of five general topics: “the relationship between historical significance and narrative patterning,” “textual fragmentation, the proliferation of genres, and the dialogic nature of history,” “the models or theories of history,” “the relationship between history and subjectivity,” and “the status of artistic imagination [... ] in relation to the representation of history” (19). While the distinction between these topics was presumably clear in the author’s own mind, there is an inevitable tendency in analytical practice for the lines between them to become blurred. With a limited range of novels on which to draw, and the necessity to return to each of them in every chapter to ponder them anew in the light of the topic of the moment, repetition and a diminution in clear ar­ gumentative purposiveness as the study advances are virtually inevitable. The result is a book that tends to move around its declared subject, looking at it from a number of different but overlapping perspectives, rather than one containing an argument that gains cumulative conviction through constituent stages. The para­ doxes outlined in the final chapter on the imagination perhaps reveal why this should be the case. When the “historical imag­ ination” reconstructs the past and in certain senses actualizes it both in and as the present, it necessarily re-enacts the pro­ cesses that have brought it to destruction. For example, Charles Wychwood’s attempts to make Chatterton live again, and enjoy a longer and fuller life than the one conventionally assumed for him, have the ironic effect...