Published Paper Details:

Abstract: This undertaken work is an attempt to analyze Graham Swift's Waterland as a historiographic metafiction. The term historiographic metafiction was coined by the Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon in the book A Poetics of Postmodernism:History, Theory, Fiction (1988). The concept of historiographic metafiction suggests that history is basically a construction and it cannot present facts objectively but is influenced by bias, interpretation, and memory. The main character and the only narrator of the novel is a history teacher named Tom Crick. The novel is a story intertwining history's grand narrative with Tom's little narrative. This paper argues that Graham Swift's Waterland undercuts the value of history as a grand narrative and how this postmodern novel blend historical events with fictional elements while simultaneously questioning the nature of historical knowledge and narrative. Swift deconstructs traditional understandings of history and storytelling, showing how both are deeply intertwined with personal memory, subjective interpretation, and the instability of truth. Tom Crick's account on the relevance of historical facts is quite doubtful and the paper also argues that Tom Crick cannot be reliable narrator and history is not an objective, factual record but a narrative process shaped by memory, storytelling, and interpretation.