Abstract
It would be no mistake to state that among the commonest routes contemporary literature in English takes is one of asserting history s and reality's fictionality and dissolving the boundary between real and imaginary. The route is certainly common enough in the work of the controversial British author Jeanette Winterson, whose prose is a never-ending interplay between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. Winterson's critically neglected Art & Lies (1995) epitomises the disintegration of clear cut lines between (auto)biography, history and fiction through a set of binaries like art/life, art/lie, or fact/fiction, transforming our ideas of truth and lie. Similar concerns inform The Passion (1987), which is more universally praised. The parallels between the two works suggest a continuum in Winterson's literary explorations of the nature of truth and reality, the status of fiction and historical record, and the usefulness of binaries and labels. This paper aims at exploring how these polyphonic prose pieces rebel against single points of view, redefine the notions of history as fact and storytelling as fabrication, and exhibit a preference for the truth of the imagination and unofficial perspectives.
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