UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Timothy Parrish

A reconsideration of the relationship between history and fiction in the context of postmodernism

Why don't we read novels as if they were histories and histories as if they were novels? Recent postmodern theorists such as Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon have argued that since history is a narrative art, it must be understood as a form of narrative representation analogous to fiction. Yet, contrary to the fears of some historians, such arguments have not undermined the practice of history as a meaningful enterprise so much as they have highlighted the appeal history has as a narrative craft.

In addressing the postmodernist claim that history works no differently than fiction, Timothy Parrish rejects the implication that history is dead or hopelessly relativistic. Rather, he shows how the best postmodern novelists compel their readers to accept their narratives as true in the same way that historians expect their readers to accept their narratives as true. These novelists write history as a form of fiction.

If the great pre-modernist American historians are Francis Parkman, George Bancroft, and Henry Adams, who are the great modernist or postmodernist historians? In the twentieth century, Parrish argues, the most powerful works of American history were written by William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Cormac McCarthy. What survives a reading of these novels is the sense that writers otherwise identified as multicultural or postmodern share the view that nothing matters more than history and what one believes its possibilities to be. In other words, Parrish concludes, history, not identity, is the ground of postmodern American fiction.

“The strength of this book is the author's lucid prose and his individual readings, which are generally excellent, consistently illuminating (Libra , Democracy, Mason & Dixon), occasionally challenging of critical orthodoxy (Absalom, Absalom and, to some extent, Blood Meridian), or groundbreaking (Fiskadoro). . . . The book also has the potential to intervene in some of the more vigorous debates currently taking place across fields over contemporary U.S. liberalism and its relation to matters of cultural and national identity.”

Jeffrey Insko, Oakland University

Timothy Parrish is associate professor of English at Texas Christian University and author of Walking Blues: Making Americans from Emerson to Elvis (University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

Literary Studies / American Studies
320 pp.
$28.95 paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-627-9
$80.00 library cloth edition, ISBN 978-1-55849-626-2
March 2008

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