This dissertation argues that postmodern American fiction has strategically performed a series of rewritings. These range from a blurring of boundaries between author, narrator, and text that demonstrates the power of fiction (and calls attention to itself as such) to later pastiches of existing texts and styles. Another form of rewriting that occurs is a combination of these methods that also evokes the idea of truth and its conversion into the fictive. Meditations on history, how it is written and processed, and the kinds of narratives that have emerged as reliable, true, and “correct” are important features of this genre. Postmodern writers who deal with the historical past and engage with, rewrite, and subvert the historical fiction genre find themselves navigating boundaries. Concerned with the longing for a tangible and “knowable” history, they write to fill its absence. I am concerned with how these texts use postmodernist and metafictional strategies to explore the past and what it means to us in the present, especially with regard to the textuality of history itself.
Each of my chapters seeks out exemplary texts of a stage in the evolution of historiographic metafiction. Chapter 1 reassesses two seminal examples of the genre that date from the 1960s, Thomas Pynchon’s V. and John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor. They present a forked path for postmodern literature’s engagement with history. Pynchon reconstructs where Barth reimagines. Both pioneer an often absurdist, farcical “secret” history. Chapter 2 turns its focus to the innovation of alternate history, which has its origins in science fiction. Philip K. Dick’s World War II alternate history The Man in the High Castle serves to illustrate how alternate history has carved out new territory within historiographic metafiction. Two later alternate histories, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, expand on and revise Dick’s groundbreaking work. Chapter 3 focuses on historiographic metafiction written about the 18th and 19th centuries. Dating roughly from the mid-to-late 1990s, I consider these novels—Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing, and Diane Glancy’s Stone Heart—to form not only a literary subgenre, but a focused reinterrogation of an era. In Chapter 4, I focus on the presentation of 20th century secret history, which first appears in Ishmael Reed’s anarchic Mumbo Jumbo. In Ragtime E.L. Doctorow provides a template for Don DeLillo’s unlikely collision of historical and pop-cultural figures that creates a parodic secret history ending in the rise of popular culture and the cult of the image. DeLillo, in Underworld and Libra, chronicles the “American magic and dread” of the 20th century’s darkest moments. My coda focuses on the emergence of the historical graphic novel. This explosion of texts both furthers the evolution of historiographic metafiction and recapitulates its progress up to this point. Ultimately, my project offers a significant new answer to the question of how postwar American fiction dealt with the nation’s history, the literary aftershocks of which continue to shape this century’s fiction.