“To Make a History From This Kind of Material is Not Easy”: The Narrative Construction of Cultural History in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract

Abstract In a postmodern understanding of textuality, fact and fiction can no longer be regarded as opposites; in this context, Hayden White’s studies of fictional techniques in historical texts have initiated an interdisciplinary discussion about the significance of fictional narration as a meaningful cultural technique. The narrative reconstruction of the history of lost civilisations and earlier cultures also plays a central role in contemporary literature in English. The historiographical search for the reality of the lives of earlier oral cultures and the attempt to provide academic interpretations of such cultures in order to explain the past structure novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Jane Yolen’s Sister Light, Sister Dark, and Doris Lessing’s The Cleft. By analysing the different textual layers and narrative forms of these novels, the difficulties of a historiographical reconstruction of lost cultures in the medium of fiction are highlighted and the ambivalent truth claims of academic discourse become apparent. These novels illustrate how the integration and negotiation of historiography in fictional literature creates a tension-fraught discursive network of different competing voices that sheds light on the complex processes of cultural meaning-making.