HISTORICISING THE NEW

Where the last chapter set out to trace the development of a new kind of temporality fashioned by the late prose stylists of the twenty-first century, a new way of thinking about historical persistence as we enter into the early decades of the century, this chapter explores the formal mechanisms by which the past is inherited, under contemporary conditions.

The fiction of the twenty-first century, I will argue here, invents new forms with which to narrate the past. Across a very wide range of styles and genres of fiction, and in a number of different national and political contexts, it is possible to see the development of a new mode of historical fiction, and a new kind of fictional historiography, which allows for a different encounter with the past than that which emerged from the dominant fictional forms of the later twentieth century. This development, I will argue, takes place in part as a reaction against what might be thought of as the dominant postmodern historiography of the later twentieth century. Fredric Jameson famously diagnosed one of the symptoms of the postmodern culture of the later twentieth century as a ‘weakening of historicity’. The fiction, and the broader cultural practices of the postwar period, in an extraordinary number of contexts and scenarios, combined to effect this weakening, to produce the perception that historical consciousness had achieved a kind of freedom from its material and empirical foundations. Jameson’s diagnosis of postmodern historiography is part of a very broad intellectual movement, which challenged the materiality of our cultural reference points more generally, and which tended to regard historical knowledge as a function of narrative; history no longer seen as original event, which a secondary narrative strives to recount, but as itself the outcome of narrative forms, which are accorded as a result a primary, originating power.