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A Case for the New Historical Novel
An undergraduate dissertation submitted by
Alan D. Sargeant
For the Department of English Studies
Sheffield Hallam University 1993
Carried out under the supervision of Dr Keith Green

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Abstract
The following dissertation would like to propose the emergence of an entirely new
genre in the mid-1980s period: the New Historical novel; as uniquely defined within the
broad panorama of Post Modernist Literature as Magic Realism and Metafiction. I
would also like to propose that its emergence and popularity is a manifestation of a
crisis within the notion of genre itself and can be viewed against the wider anxieties of
modern culture. Each of the novels looked at address issues relating to Foucault s
concept of the heterotopia and the processes by which reality is constructed socially
and history is produced. For the sake of clarity and brevity I have focused on just two
novels: Myself and Marco Polo (1989) and Beloved (1987).

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Contents
Chapters
01. Introduction: a case for the New Historical novel ..... 04-06
02. Making a drama out of a crisis ..... 07-16
03. The precession of maps and voices ..... 16-21
04. Would the real subject please now step forward ..... 21-24
05. Discursive sampling: a question of authenticity ..... 24-29
06. The occupied territory of the word ..... 29-32
07. The definers and the defined ..... 32-35
08. The iron upon the tongue ..... 35-41
09. Summation ..... 41
10. References ..... 42-46

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Chapter 1
Introduction: A case for the New Historical novel
As the key assumptions of New Historicism begin to gain traction among even the
most sceptical of historians and literary critics, it may now be possible to
acknowledge the more mindful (and certainly more marketable) emergence of an
entirely new genre: the New Historical novel; as uniquely defined within the
broad panorama of Post Modernist Literature as either Magic Realism, Fabulation,
Cyberpunk and Metafiction.
Up until now the distinctive narrative properties that characterise novels
like Umberto Eco’s The Name of The Rose, A. S. Byatt's Possession or Flaubert’s
Parrot by Julian Barnes, have been either consumed or appreciated within the
broader contexts of Postmodernist Metafiction and Fabulation. And whilst all
three of the novels above clearly satisfy the criteria associated with each of these
genres, the conceptual hierarchy here differs slightly. In the New Historical Novel
the constitutive elements of history no longer outrank those of fiction. We have
something that is a little more egalitarian. There has been a levelling, of sorts.
In many of these novels, past and present become blurred and the
privileges of historicity are systematically either challenged or revoked by the
realisation that both history and reality is a socio-cultural construct.
In the New Historical Novel, myth, legend and history exist on the same
ontological plane, and are defined by the same narrative customs. Real events and

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fantasy collide and fuse in a fashion that is almost impossible to divide. The
subject of the novel is typically viewed as being locked in an interminable cycle
of masking and being unmasked, with the author often surmising that there are no
unchanging truths. The truth is always at one remove and any attempt to uncover
it is frustrated by the realisation that the author himself is frequently obliged to
recycle the lies and obfuscations that keep it buried.
That it is a literary genre is no more than conjecture on my part, as the
term does not refer to any currently recognized literary concept; it is a proposal,
nothing more. It is the intention of this discussion to bring evidence before you in
support of this proposal.
The novels that I wish to include in support of my proposal are Toni
Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Paul Griffiths’ Myself and Marco Polo (1989).
Both novels deal with historical issues, and the way in which everything from
history to conceptions of the self can be viewed as the consequence or the
narrative orogeny of specific discourses and social processes. Although I have so
far used the term ‘the New Historical novel’ to describe a new genre or narrative
form, I am also aware that it exists simultaneously as a symptom or condition of a
broader anxiety within popular culture and art today. I will argue that the New
Historical novel is not only an increasingly lucrative publishing option but a
manifestation of a particular crisis within the notion of genre itself.

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Like so many of the titles that exist within the panoply of Postmodernist
literature, the New Historical novel is trans-generic. A curious patch-work of
forms and idioms particular to other genres, books like The Name of the Rose and
Possession stand somewhat detached from other genre fiction: the detective story,
the romance, the conventional science fiction story. It sits there with them on the
bookshelves and yet it remains aloof and somewhat eccentric amongst a stack of
other titles. Neither popular nor literary in the strictest sense of the word, the New
Historical novel is everything and nothing. It satisfies both the casual consumer
and the lofty pretensions of students and fellow writers alike. They have literary
merit and commercial appeal. Is Myself and Marco Polo a history or a fantasy? Is
it a Romance or a memoir? Can it be filed under Travel Literature? No one
answer is correct. The novel eludes such definitions and may have evolved in
concomitance with the emergence of ‘quality paperbacks’ and the shifts in
capitalism globally. Book publishing has suddenly become attractive to investors
and both large and small publishers are having to juggle their literary and
intellectual commitments with the new demands placed on them by stakeholder
returns and profits. In this respect, the New Historical novel (not unlike
Cyberpunk) may also be the product of new economic realities, a combination of
‘tradition and innovation’ (The Guardian newspaper, September 1992). The
increasing popularity of the Man Booker Prize amongst the British press and
public alike also seems to support this idea: high art is, for the first time in
publishing history, converting into high sales.

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Chapter 2
Making a drama out of a crisis
This is what I mean by a ‘condition’. The New Historical novel exploits its own
medium to both satisfy and transform its message. It subverts the expectations of
its readers and violates the protocols and courtesies of its own mass consumption.
In the author’s attempt to find creative freedom within the narrow limits of
commercial publishing and genre fiction, they have not only given birth to a
whole new of way of writing but to a whole new way of commodifing that writing,
and a whole new way of seeing history.
In this respect the New Historical flouts the usual conventions of genre. It
also bucks trends in publishing. In such a saturated climate of types and
definitions, divisions and sub-divisions, genres and sub-genres the New Historical
novel pursues artistic freedom and yet acknowledges the enormous debt it pays to
previous writers and market forces.
The same thing could easily be said of contemporary music. Beyond
simple issues relating to fads or fashion, the ‘sampling’ industry might be better
understood as a strategy deployed by artists eager to reject traditional notions of
ownership, influence and possession. On the other hand, it might also be viewed
as a more cynical attempt to speed-up modes of production and distribution. The
sampled sequence lays down a challenge: “I am made up of many 'voices', which
one voice could ever claim me?” Whether it is a concession to the demands of

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market forces and mass-consumption, or whether it is the expression of a new
egalitarian impulse, it seems that more and more bands and artists are
acknowledging the democratic nature of sound and influence.
What we encounter today is a crisis of influence. We are being asked to
question the derivative character of art itself and review the various layers that
typify both life and art. The dilemmas and anxieties that occupied the thoughts of
only a handful of sceptical academics like Foucault and Derrida are filtering down
to the mainstream. The success of BBC dramas like The Singing Detective (1986)
and Twin Peaks (1980) proves there is a growing appetite for plots and themes
revolving around playful issues of intertextuality, disparity, multiple viewpoints,
parody and autobiography. And amongst musicians and music fans the appetite is
no less keen. The taut, incessant bassline lifted from Queen and David Bowie’s,
1981 hit, ‘Under Pressure’ made ‘Ice Ice Baby’ by Vanilla Ice the first
Postmodern ‘No.1’ in British history (less commercially success examples of
‘plunderphonics’ or ‘audioquoting’ (1) include releases by John Oswald, Pizzicato
Five, Pop Will Eat Itself and the Tape Beatles, few of which ever made it into the
charts).
It may not be the mass phenomenon it is in music, but the tropes of Postmodernist
are certainly registering on the bookshelves.
In certain respects, the cross-referencing of musical styles, derivative
voices and sound images is very similar to the lamination effect in literature. Over
the course of a four-minute song you can have dozens of different styles, registers,

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and various ambient sound samples all jostling for your attention, and altering the
basic space-time parameters of the standard pop song.
Philosophers like Michel Foucault and Mikhail Baktain have developed
this idea within their own respective theories of ‘polyphony’, ‘dialogism’ and
‘heteroglossia' (2). The originality of thought, word or deed lies not in some
‘subatomic explosion’ of particles or ideas but in how voices and ideas collide
with other voices and ideas within an existing dialectic. Originality arises from the
innumerable ways in which the extremes of rival discourses can interact:
“What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable
identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other things. It is disparity.”
(3)
The narrative focus of the New Historical novel lies in tracing the various ways in
which history can be seen to evolve, and the mass of competitive discourses from
which it is conceived.
Unlike many Postmodernist novels and metafictions, the New Historical
novel does not attempt to trash or to sabotage the covert systems of the forms
through which it operates - Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry here springs to
mind - instead I would like to suggest that the New Historical novel employs
those codes in a manner that is both playful and respectful, exploiting the various
mechanisms, 'matrices', 'codes' and 'systems' that constitute such texts, in a way
that reinforces rather than escapes them. For instance, Myself and Marco Polo by
Paul Griffiths brings to the fore those discreet, covert practices that give the

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historical narrative its formal characteristics: the use of historical backdrop,
famous or notable figures, vaguely imperialist settings (4), political bias or racial
prejudice, the problematic nature of recall, multiple-perspectives and (sometimes
deliberate) human error. It also draws attention to the failure of historians to use
other recording channels as part of their standard methodology. In the hands of
Griffiths, the reality of an historical figure can be grasped as much through his
music or food tastes, as it can through an epic chronology of major breakthroughs
and achievements. The novel does not so much turn reality on its head, as punch a
series of additional spy holes in the kaleidoscope through which we view it. The
account the explorer’s ghost writer Rustichello ends up producing might not be
the one that Griffiths’ Polo had in mind, but like so many historical accounts it is
far more imaginative and entertaining than the truth could ever be.
It may be that novels like Myself and Marco Polo have a metadiscursive
element. The book helps foreground those formal elements, registers and
discourses that typically comprise historical fiction, throwing relief onto the social
frameworks and dimensions that contribute to communicating the past. The
various stunts the writer pulls in terms of intertextuality, whether it is simple
parody, references to other books or verbal allusions, are often carried out with a
degree of sympathy and resignation.
For the most part Griffiths’ novel operates within the traditional
parameters of the historical narrative form on which it attempts to provide some
insight; it is both ‘immanent and transcendent’ (5). The New Historical novel
enjoys an enlightened discourse, one aware of its own modes, habits and

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pretences. It is both a meta-history and a ‘metafiction’ — a term coined by
William Gass and the popularised by Robert Scholes in the 1970s (6). However,
its interests are clearly not confined to text. The determination of authors like
Griffiths to reveal those codes and systems that make up the properties of history
suggests that the New Historical writer is ‘reading with the grain’ as opposed to
‘reading against it’ (7). It is like the magician who reveals his secrets roughly at
the time he performs his tricks.
The fact that novels like these derive much of their philosophical content
and their focus from the theories of New Historicism suggest that the New
Historical novel is something of a creative analogue to, or an expression of this
increasingly influential critical movement. The seminal notions of uber-
fashionable theorists like Jonothan Dollimore and Stephen Greenblatt have
filtered down into the consciousness of the contemporary writer. And whilst I am
not trying to suggest that writers like Griffiths and Morrison elucidate these
theories in a deliberately contrived or conscious fashion — effectively
‘storyboarding’ these concerns — there seems to be some indication that the
critical climate of the late 1970s and early 1980s has had some influence on both
these authors. The process by which reality is encoded emotionally and culturally
is currently being addressed with almost neurotic predictability by authors and
critical theorists right across the board, from Umberto Eco to Fredric Jameson.
The very fabric of truth and identity is encountering a testy challenge.
Although it seems unlikely that Griffith’s tale of ‘cognitive mapping’ is a
direct reference to Frederic Jameson’s 1988 essay of the same name, both writers

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seem to concede that the traditional nodes and boundaries that define individuals
at a geographical and cultural level, are often be based on floating markers. As
Jameson puts it:
“There is...a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems
studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and
Lacanian) redefinition of ideology as "the representation of the subject's
Imaginary relationship to his or her real conditions of existence.” (8)
How reality and its various shares and derivatives like ‘history’ are constructed
from complex social processes must rank as one of the most compelling themes in
art today (9). Next I would like to examine the various ways in which the
contemporary ‘historical’ novel addresses these concerns.
I think it would be fair to say that the New Historical novel has a ‘hands
on’ approach to theory that’s significantly more transparent than works in other
genres. Here is an example of what I mean:
“You mistake me”, I said. “There is nothing deliberate in the misleading:
the book misleads me as much as it does you, or will do its readers. We are
all passive victims of its deceit.”
“Is there nothing we can do, no effort we can make?”
“Nothing. None. Not by this stage. We are entrammelled in a process over
which we have relatively little control. We are, if you like, discovering a

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book which already exists, as a road exists before we travel it - though we
do not know how it will continue.”
“I thought we were the book's authors.”
“So we are: discoverers are always authors, inventors.' I think I can speak
for you in that. (Marco Polo and Myself p.27)
Myself and Marco Polo puckishly addresses the Foucauldian notion of the
‘heterotopia’ (10) . This is the zone where the actual and the imaginary collide in
an unpredictable and often contradictory fashion. For Michel Foucault, who
coined the term, heterotopias are an ‘ever-accumulating’ hub of simultaneity.
Take ‘Christmas’ for example, a headspace dominated by excessive
sentimentality, dramatic weather failures and transitory episodes of faith. Tearing
away at the gift-wrapping on Christmas morning reveals an extraordinary
compound of pleasure and disappointment, elation and anti-climax. And all of this
is accompanied by frequent random eruptions of images from past lives: your first
nativity, Morecambe & Wise, a sock with an apple, an orange and some nuts in it.
It may be unseasonably mild outside, but on the inside it is snowing. Our entire
experience of Christmas is derived from the warm semantic frisson of Christmas
pasts and Christmas presents; it’s a dream, a semantic space. But heterotopias are
not any one thing. According to Foucault the heterotopia is also the geographical
and historical space onto which we project our ideologies and various knowledge
systems. It has real-world and inner world characteristics. The notion is not
referred to explicitly by Griffiths, but it features nevertheless.

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As a metaphor for the mapping of those experiential spaces that exist
beyond the grasp of simple juxtaposition, the theme of cartography in the novel
couldn’t be better conceived. This is what Marco Polo is all about: map-making,
cartography, finding a route through an uncertain world at the very dawn of
discovery. The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges dramatises a similar
account of recovering experiences from the hinterland of a ‘no space’ — those
mind or memory palaces. The ‘heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time’
which Michel Foucault refers to in his essay, Of Other Spaces is used to describe
the libraries and museums of the 19th
and 20th
Centuries. In spaces like these time
piles up, locking in place all time and all shapes. According Michel Foucault,
museums are, quite literally, chronic time-keepers of a chronology that just keep
accumulating time (heterochronies). History, like Focault’s mirrors, or the
bookshelves in Borges’ library, reflects the infinite unreality of historical or
‘mapping’ projects (11). The mirror, as he sees it, shapes rather than reflects the
experience of ‘otherness’. As Foucault explains in Of Other Spaces:
“The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several
spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” (12)
This special zone of meaning first visualised by Foucault is now cropping up
everywhere in publishing. Whether it is the two ‘authentic’ parrots in Flaubert’s
Parrot by Julian Barnes or the story of Marco Polo languishing with his ghost-
writer, Rustichello in a Genoan prison cell, this genre is a jolly and robust rebuke
to the totality of the world and the world’s quietly expanding histories.

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In the New Historical novel everything is subjective, de-centered and de-
totalised. The traditional unity of the historical narrative is smashed into a dozen
fragments. And as a result, Polo, Flaubert and his fifty ‘authentic’ parrots have a
life that will endure long after we’ve finished reading:
"Discourse transmits and produces power; reinforces it and exposes it,
renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it." (13)
Totalized theories can be resisted. When a discourse is allowed no ‘obscurity’ or
no ‘respite’ it simply cannot be maintained; its productivity is short-lived (14). By
contrast, the cut-up individuals and notoriously fluid events at the heart of New
Historical novel bravely resist the 'incitement to discourse by the organs of power
themselves' (15). It’s a rebellious and unruly genre — iconoclasm, but with wit.
Like ‘pluderphonics’ and ‘audioquoting’ the New Historical novel
grapples with the realisation that the creative or writing voice is not exclusively
the author's own; that he or she is not its only source. The book’s title should give
us a clue. It’s called Myself and Marco Marco. But who is myself in all of this? Is
it the author? Me, you? Rustichello the scribe? And it’s this eccentric, deictic intro
that sets the tone of the whole novel.
Art, Stephen Greenblatt assures us, has only the 'illusion of freedom' (17).
In the end, the human subject can only reproduce those power structures that
originally determined his or her own consciousness. It is a claim that dominates
the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison. The writer is in this respect compelled to
renew those knowledge systems; those discourses that have been privileged,

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normalized and legitimized. The New Historical novelist, like the cultural or
political theorist, takes on the task of addressing the recycling of ideological data
within history and the present.
In the next phase of my discussion I would like to consider the ways in
which Morrison and Griffiths’ novels confront the ideological requisition of
history and reality; the ease with which the human subject shapes the world into
his or her own image, and the ease with which the world moulds us into its.
Drawing from a range of alternative theories currently being disseminated by the
New Historicist movement, I hope to demonstrate how history is not a seam of
retrievable facts anymore than our present reality is a seam of objective or
bankable data.
Chapter 3
The Precession of Maps and Voices
Through reliance on various discourses, dominant cultures incapacitate our
endeavours to realize an historical 'otherness' (18). And it is a claim that is taken
up by both these novelists. Like Griffiths’ Marco Polo, or Toni Morrison’s
character Sethe, the rights the individual enjoys to move freely between past,
present and future are routinely frustrated by a slew of assumptions we make
about our world, and it is on this basis that I would like to move my argument
forward:
“What sort of book do you have in mind?”

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It’s more a question of what lies hidden in your mind?”
(Myself & Marco Polo p.5)
The question that I have quoted above is asked by the inquisitive and occasionally
overzealous scribe, Rustichello in Paul Griffiths’ novel, Myself and Marco Polo
(1989). In the circumstances, it is a reasonable enough question to ask. The scribe,
Rustichello would like to know the sort of book his cellmate Marco Polo has in
mind to recall his extraordinary voyage from Venice to Peking. In this respect the
question is quite ordinary, quite run of the mill. But this is no run of the mill
novel. What makes the question interesting is not the pushy, decisive way in
which Rustichello subsequently tackles the issue of authorship and production,
it’s the philosophical way in which Marco turns the question back on his scribe:
how does the scribe see the story developing? Crudely or transparently, the author
is the addressing the core principles and concerns of Postmodernist metafiction.
The rhetorical affectations may be a touch overplayed at times, but it works in this
particular context.
Right from the word go the reader is being asked to consider the very
nature of ‘authorship’. We are asked to review the complex mechanisms by which
stories are produced. It’s becomes clear from reading just a few chapters of the
novel that history adapts instinctively to the various customs and habits of
traditional of fiction-making. Routine failures of memory distort accounts, facts
become partially obscured by style, observations are commonly overruled by
objectives and the clumsy hand of the narrative often disrupts the chronological
sequence. What the question does, I would like to suggest, is reveal an emerging

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crisis within traditional notions of historiography: just who and what is the 'real'
subject?
Paul Griffiths' irreverent novel does a good job of describing a well
established pattern of literary and cultural appropriation in which audiences like
ourselves, attempt to redefine the historical Marco Polo in contemporary terms.
The novelist is illustrating the process whereby we project our own desires and
knowledge systems onto the historical screen or canvass. In this way Griffiths is
both addressing the plasticity of historical images and the plasticity of fact itself:
the effortless way in which audiences make figures like Marco Polo (and the
worlds they inhabit) conform to our own ideological standards. And ironically, it
the gaps in our knowledge that allow us to do this.
The scarcity of objective detail or these gaps in Polo's life contribute to his
malleability. Like Foucault’s heterotopias our impression is shaped by ‘absence’.
In the context of our and Rustichello’s imaginations at least, Polo exists ‘outside
of all places’ (19). Like a museum, Marco Polo occupies the space of memory and
vague chronologies. His historical life adapts as fluidly to our analysis as the boat
in which the explorer is said to have sailed between the Adana and Alexandretta.
In fact it is because of these very gaps that both Polo and his image refuse to yield
the information necessary to form an ‘authentic’ portrait. Griffiths seems very
much aware that like Shakespeare and Atlantis, Robin Hood and UFOs the legend
of Marco Polo has evolved out of its own mystery, its removal from the truth.
What gives the image its life are the possibilities, the accumulation of possible
facts and scraps of evidence:

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“ You speak of chronicle”, ' I said, “of the dates of battles, kings and
popes, the numbers killed, begotten and canonised, the prices of swords,
silence and simony, the weights of corpses, jewels if you'd kept meticulous
notebooks on your journey, then perhaps you might have offered us
something of a faithful record.” (Myself and Marco Polo p.55)
The author of the chronicle is at the mercy of available data. Without that
available data the 'faithful record', as Griffiths calls it, will degenerate into myth.
The possibilities though, are what keeps the dream or the legend alive. Historians
feed the myth, each piece of startling new ‘evidence’ contributing to its range of
attractive possibilities. The life of the chosen subject becomes literally prolific; it
becomes self-reproducing and self-generating, totally detached from its
phenomenological conception in cold, hard matter. The historian in this way
becomes the conservationist of the myth. The vacant areas in the historical life —
these gaps or else these blanks — have allowed successive generations to
contribute elements of themselves, facets of their own unique cultures. Griffiths
seems to be suggesting that if we looked at the historical Marco Polo in terms of a
literal portrait, whose fragile brushstrokes and faded resins had been none-too-
carefully restored with modern oils and modern colours, then we would see that it
had retained those elements of those people who had since treated it and restored
it; that it had retained elements of their own imaginative personalities.
The image is in this very way endlessly developing and accommodating
new cast members. Faced with the Polo of Griffiths’ novel we become conscious
of many lives. It starts with just one man, the inmate of a prison. But as his scribe

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gets to work we begin to see many Marco Polos. There is an imaginative
proliferation of equally authentic imprints (or in the context of Flaubert’s Parrot,
a proliferation of equally authentic birds). The author of this novel draws our
attention as audience (and cast member) to the ‘hidden’ lives below the surface:
the discreet or secret life of the biographer and/or observer.
Jean. I. Marsden in her book The Appropriation of Shakespeare (1991)
describes a similar process of historical appropriation:
“To appropriate: to take possession of for one's own sake; to take to
oneself: Associated with abduction, adoption and theft, appropriation's
central tenet is the desire for possessing. It comprehends both the
commandeering of the desired object and the process of making this object
one’s own, controlling by possessing it. Appropriation is neither
disinterested nor dispassionate.” (20)
In the replies he gives to Rustichello, Polo appears to foresee his own ongoing re-
possession and the ‘theft’ of his historical image at the hands of successive
cultures. Culture seeks to manage and produce reality. Literature and
historiography offer just two means by which to do this, and in the wrong hands,
they can be a repressive apparatus through which a subject can be dominated or
enslaved (21). Whether Griffiths is conscious of it or not, Polo is revealed as part
of a routine process whereby a dominant ideology redistributes itself through
images it has appropriated and reproduced. The adventurer becomes a channel

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through which Rustichello circulates his own ideology (22), his own desires and
own identity:
“If ... through these unscored days I've been looking so much at this other
face I know it better than my own - for a moment I'm unsure whether I'm
Rustichello looking at Marco or Marco looking in a mirror.” (Myself &
Marco Polo, p.54)
In retaining traces of those people who have desired to tell his story Polo has to
some extent become what Eco might describe as a 'transworld identity' (23) - a
conflation of real and unreal: of fictional projections and real-world experiences.
Chapter 4
Would the real subject please now step forward
Who is the real or central subject of biography? In the novel, Polo sits Rustichello
down and the scribe is expected to write; but about whom, and about what? The
scribe has been informed that he is to transcribe the epic journey that Polo is
reported to have taken from Venice to Peking; this is his task, his own adventure.
But he has been asked by the famed adventurer to undertake another commission:
he has been asked to produce a ‘romance’:
“I am to be the figure of your next Romance.” (Myself & Marco Polo p.5)
In much the same way that a recording engineer is tasked with capturing the
sound and form of a band's material, or a producer or arranger is tasked with

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shaping a rough idea, the historian is tasked with recording and producing history.
The historian takes and arranges the events, undertakings and experiences of the
subject and renders them into an intelligible and meaningful form. If the work of
the sound engineer is characterized by the removal of hiss and imperfections, bum
notes, and extraneous noises coming from outside the studio, then the historian’s
work is likewise characterized by the removal of random acts, trivial details and
contradictions to chronology. The ghost writer or the scribe must give a series of
causative episodes an observable narrative order:
“interpretation is a key part of each historian's work and consists largely of
providing a 'plot structure' for a sequence of events so that their nature as a
comprehensible is revealed by their figuration as a story of a particular
kind.” (Hayden White. 24.)
Jean. I. Marsden is quite right: ‘interpretation’ of this kind is never ‘dispassionate’
or ‘disinterested’. The historian must provide a 'pattern of intelligibility' (25) —
something native or unique to the age and culture in which that history is
produced. The interpretation in this way must respond to an established order, and
conform to the methodology of traditional historiographics; it is a normalising
procedure (26).
As Norman. K. Denzin suggests in book, Interpretive Autoethnography,
autobiography is ‘imaginative organization of experience that imposes a distortion
of truth’ (27) And this is also true of history, which likewise seeks to master the

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meaningful order of events by smoothing over inconsistencies, anomalies and
contradictions to provide a 'total' and continuous unity (28).
Just like other forms of ideological apparatus identified by Althusser (29)
the history-machine suppresses, subordinates and repeats, emphasises and omits
information that our real lives feed into it. It seeks not just a meaning, but a
particular kind of meaning: a meaning that satisfies the socio-political context and
the emotional context of those tasked with writing it. The historian, like the scribe,
contaminates the image with elements of their own inherited ideology. The
ideology and the culture from which these images sprang, is reconstructed and
redistributed by and through their representations.
Hayden White explains:
“through the dominant tropes and narrative structures, it gives to 'history' a
shape owing as much to the patterns of intelligibility available to the
historian from his or her own culture as to those that may have informed a
prior age.” (30)
Both the prison of preceding images and the 'prison of the present moment' (31)
frustrate and incapacitate our various attempts to realize ‘historical and cultural
otherness’. We are committed to viewing such figures from our own ‘partial’ and
limited viewpoints (32). The history that we produce is part translation, part
transmutation. The actual Marco Polo, or rather the image we have of him today,
is a cultural formation: a ‘remarkably unfree’ cultural artefact (33).

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The self, as Wylie Sypher sees it, floats endlessly about in a ‘universal
culture medium’ (34). The New Historical writer engages similarly with the
possibility that the typical human consciousness is a controlled zone or colonized
territory. And it’s a theme that has been dominant right throughout Cyberpunk
and right throughout Postmodernism in general. Brian McHale takes up the issue:
Experience of reality and the self is constructed by and through specific
discourses, languages and sign-systems:
“identified with Wittgenstein and linguistic philosophy, and more recently
with Michel Foucault, this intellectual tendency is now widely diffused
throughout the so-called human sciences.” (35)
McHale is not asking you to subscribe to this philosophy, simply to acknowledge
it exists. And it is issues relating to discourse that will dominate the next phase of
my discussion.
Chapter 5
Discursive Sampling: A Question of Authenticity
Like the archaeologist who will trace the layers of different strata in the rock or
fossil seam, it is the task of the New Historical novelist to locate and recover those
lost or poorly preserved remains that traditional history writing has sought to
cover up. I am of course talking about discourses: the secretive conceptual
framework that provides communication with its distinctive (and occasionally
toxic) payload. Or, to put it another way, those very specific ways of thinking that
are expressed through language.

25. Page | 25
Novels like Myself and Marco Polo scrape away at the discursive layers
that make up the historical subject. Bit by bit, the irreverent scribe, Rustichello
splits off the various layers that have produced the explorer’s history. As he does
so, the author reveals Polo’s historical imprint to be a site where the ‘many voices
of culture and many voices of intelligibility interact’ (36). Drawing upon the
theories of deconstruction developed by Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin,
Griffiths is able to deliver a damaging blow to the unified surface of the famous
explorer’s image and in doing so we catch a glimpse of the various layers and
heterochronies that comprise his image:
“Hi there! Its Marco ... Marco! Marco Polo? You know, Venetia High and
all that? You see, I just got back, and I was kind of ... Oh she was just
great, I mean because...No ... No, she hadn't - but anyways, how are you?”
(Myself and Marco Polo p.66)
Rustichello hears of Polo's return by ways of a telephone call. It is not a
messenger or a scroll, as you might typically expect of the period and the genre, it
comes via 20th
century media. And this kind of thing happens all the time in the
novel. One moment Griffiths will depict Polo beneath the glare of a torch, the next
beneath florescent lighting. The entire story is seen by way of conversations,
restaurant reviews, disquisitions on Chinese Opera, advertisements in Yellow
pages, and family tête-à-têtes, each vying for narrative dominance. Griffiths
reveals the typical game-play of discursive politics in which the dominant and the
marginal are locked in a messy, protracted power struggle. Crucially, it is also this
use of anachronism that reveals Polo’s historical ‘otherness’.

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The interweaving of different registers, languages and discourses in a way
that exposes conflict or contradiction, is known in the literary world as
heteroglossia (37). Sir Walter Scott and T.S Eliot both used it to good effect. The
essential difference between Scott and Griffiths, however, is that Griffiths does
not attempt unify these any of these worlds onto a ‘single ontological plane’; that
is, a 'unified projected world ' (38). Brian McHale acknowledges a similar
approach in his discussion of Eliot's The Wasteland and Donald Barthelme's The
Indian Uprising. Eliot does his best to assert ‘unity in the face of the text's
disintegrative tendencies’ whilst Barthelme’s novel, drawn as it is to the principles
of disunity, rejects any sense of a successful marriage (39). Scott’s style conforms
significantly more to the former, suppressing or smoothing out the natural
boundaries of his worlds, and concealing their nature as constructs.
Unlike the New Historical novelist, writers such as Scott do not reveal or
draw attention to their own socio-political viewpoint in relation to historical data.
The 'Politics of Authenticity' (40) is felt at every turn. Whether it is Eco’s Palace
of Living Arts or any one of the fifty parrots in the novel by Julian Barnes, the
game that is being played out in the New Historical novel is between the copy and
the fake, between the real and the illusion. At this anxiety seems to be at the heart
of modern life. Where's the origin? Where's the truth? How am I to tell the
difference between the real thing and the fake?
Marshall Berman, writing in 1970, identifies this now common anxiety:

27. Page | 27
“Our society is filled with people who are ardently yearning and
consciously striving for authenticity: moral philosophers who are
exploring the idea of self-realization; psychiatrists and their patients who
are working to strengthen and develop 'ego identity'....Countless
anonymous men and women all over... are fighting, desperately and
against all odds, simply to preserve, to feel, to be themselves.” (41)
The search for the true amongst the false or for faith amongst the fakes has
become something of an obsession within the creative and academic communities.
And if the success of The Singing Detective and Twin Peaks is anything to go by,
it’s entirely possible that the same concerns are taking root in the broader playing-
field of popular-culture.
This creeping paranoia has taken some years to develop. The virtual reality
system, synthetic limbs and synthetic fabrics have all fomented various forms of
anxiety to one degree or another. At every stop and every turn lurks the spectre of
simulation (42). With arms outstretched we grasp at nothing; reality in a sense has
all but disappeared (43). We do not see a neutral or objective environment, we see
a world of a priori images — a word ‘signposted by facts’:
“Europe is a great trunk road signposted by facts and outspoken opinions:
in Ayas it was already a meandering lane, by the time we got to China it
would be a footpath untrodden for a decade, barely distinguishable and
certainly unmarked by sign or symbol. One travels into obscurity.”
(Myself and Marco Polo, p.9)

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Polo is anxious to point out that however fresh and exciting the route appears, if it
passes through only known locations you will never stray beyond what you
already know. A momentary sense of freedom can only be experienced by
venturing into obscurity. For the most part the cognitive world experienced by the
individual has been mapped-out some time in advance.
In observing a familiar location, as Polo does in the book, we renew a
consensual image, a way of seeing particular things. We see it as others see it, as
ideology demands we see it. Locations that are vaguely familiar are immediately
redrafted by things we have seen before. What psychologists David E. Meyer and
Roger Schvaneveldt refer to as ‘semantic priming’ (44) or ‘repetition priming’
Polo sees as ‘outspoken opinions’ and signposts. The world we experience is
based on memory retrieval and comparison, and the words we use to describe it
have a ‘space’ that is all their own. Obscurity is not an option. This cognitive
process — encouraged by a complex interplay of 'pareidolia' and 'confirmation
bias' (45) — is what persuades the human mind to see animals in random cloud
formations or faces amongst the trees. The form or meanings of things that are
'strange' are never allowed to remain strange for any length of time. As creatures
of habit we will always recall information that reinforces what we know already.
The map in this particular instance precedes the territory it should mark-out or
describe. The old contaminates the new, the image the reality. Jean Baudrillard
takes up the issue:
“the disappearance of reality - the sensation that today the image is not
only the mirror or counterpart of the real, but begins to contaminate reality

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and to model it, conforms to reality the better to distort it: it appropriates
reality for its own ends, anticipates it to the point that the real no longer
has time to be produced.” (46)
The archive of preceding images prevents autonomous or disinterested access to a
reality; it makes reality obsolete. The sign seeks freedom from the thing because it
no longer needs the thing to ensure its abstraction and circulation; the real, in this
respect, no longer needs to be produced. Our attention is restored to the signposts
and not the places. In reducing the material world to a closed and totalized system
of ‘instantaneous images’ (47), an ideology can circulate more instantaneously
and more effectively. As Jean Baudrillard sees it:
“The West's domination may be traced to the wonderfully self -validating
circularity of its textual construction of reality.” (48)
Chapter 6
The Occupied Territory of the Word
Theorist and critic, Stephen Greenblatt — one of the founders of New Historicism
— asserts that there is no escape from the ‘interminable circularity of
representations’ (49). Reality is not available because it has been seized and is
now occupied by ideological information. In the same way that language could be
said to copy or else liquidate its own referential system, ideology could be said to
seek the liquidation of the real, through both absorbing and redistributing its
various assets (50). The practice of ‘sampling’ in popular music is very similar.

30. Page | 30
The sampled audio or musical ‘'image’ can be said to both copy and replace the
sound source it is originally binded to. In this way, the sampled note or sampled
sequence ‘liquidizes its own origins’ (51). But because the sampled image can
broadly reproduce the shape and texture of an entire orchestra, it boasts a temporal
and spatial superiority over its audio source; it becomes part of a superior
discourse whose components can move more freely and more ‘instantaneously’
than ever before.
In terms of semantics, the sampled image — rather like the silicone chip
— unites the smallest quantity of matter containing the greatest volume of
information. It is in this respect the perfect ideological conduit. If, as Marshall
McLuhan suggests, ‘power circulates in instantaneous images’ (52) then the
sampled image enjoys more semiotic value than its ‘real’ or analogue counterpart.
And in the emerging digital market it will also have more currency.
In responding as Polo does to a ‘signpost’ of a priori images he responds
like those listening to an album of sampled music. He responds to a ‘precession of
simulacra’: to recycled and reconstituted information. Like the listener he cannot
escape from the ‘interminable circularity of representations’.
“We are entrammelled in a process over which we have very little control.
We are, if you like, discovering a book which already exists, as a road
exists before we travel it.” (Myself and Marco Polo, p.27)
As the essayist and novelist Umberto Eco has argued, new books speak of old
books, just like new worlds speak of old worlds. The map again precedes the

31. Page | 31
territory. The worlds that we ‘discover’ are rendered ‘known’ within seconds of
setting eyes on them. Just as we cannot come to a text without referring or
alluding to one that we have already seen before, we cannot come to a world
without engendering a similar comparative recall. All experience is deferred in the
same way all language is deferred. This is the basic premise for Jaques Derrida's
notion of ‘differance’:
“Every concept is necessarily inscribed in a chain or system, within which
it refers to other concepts by the systematic play of differences.” (53)
What Stephen Greenblatt has described as the 'interminable circularity of
representations' Jacques Derrida has described as ‘differance’. Words defer us to
other words, signs to other signs, images to other images: we are always at one
remove. Only images are available, a chain or system of simulacra. The sign can
no more retrieve the world than the historian can retrieve the data of an historical
reality:
“One mode of historical criticism assumes that literature is connected to
history in that its representations are direct reflections of historical reality,
but one must ask what happens to that assumption when the referentiality
of language is questioned. If language refers to no ground extrinsic to
itself, what can the nature of its relationship to an historical context or
material reality.” (54)
Jean. E. Howard suggests that if one accepts certain tenets of poststructuralist
theory one must consider the possibility that the retrieval of information relating

32. Page | 32
to the quintessence of the historical past is not even conceivable (55). Each and
every dimension of the historical image is conditioned by the knowledge systems
and assumptions of the era on which it is reproduced. It’s a contaminated material
that further contaminates our world. As Richard Wilson argues in his essay,
‘Shakespeare’s Roman Carnival’ the historical paradigms of the Roman Empire,
its festivities and realpolitik, helped shaped the poetic and dramatic imagination of
Shakespeare’s history plays. There is circularity at work here; they have a
symbiotic relationship: ‘history is shaped by and shaping the present’ (56). It is
the task of the New Historical writer to dramatise this relationship; as one reader
observed of the novel, Doctor Copernicus by John Banville:
“There are not many historical novels of which it can be said that they
illuminate both the time that forms their subject matter and the time in
which they are read: Dr.Copernicus is among the very best of them.” (57)
Chapter 7
The Definers and the Defined
Gender and genre-defying pop star, David Bowie recently told one newspaper:
“If I have anything to say to thirteen and fourteen year olds it is to resist
society and take care with their sexual choices.”(58)
In you were to read the full article you would realise that Bowie is addressing the
way in which youth culture represents itself to the world; how its images are
shaped by and shaping the transgressive-normative binary opposition - how they

33. Page | 33
are locked in a circular network of conformity and resistance: ‘Don't just be gay
because its chic, or be straight because it's normal — be true to your own nature’.
Or so we are allowed to infer.
But what is our real nature, our true selves? Does such an essentialist self exist?
What Bowie fails to point out, however, is how grotesquely limited these
‘choices’ really are. Just whose hands is our sexuality in? Our own perhaps? The
hands of society? The men and the women we meet? Or is it more within a system
of preceding images; within historical representations? Jacques Derrida has this to
say:
“the authority of representation constrains us, imposing itself on our
thought through a whole dense, enigmatic and heavily stratified history. It
programs and precedes us.” (59)
If the Postmodernist is right, then our sexualities and our identities have been
compiled from a miscellany of sources: from history, from newspapers, from
television and from literature — the list it seems is endless. And if this is so, then
how much autonomy do we really have?
As you might expect, David Bowie doesn’t resolve this complex issue but it’s
interesting that he addresses this crisis in contemporary culture: the question of
self-appropriation and the frustrated attempts we make in forging over and against
the range of stereotypes, a coherent and ‘authentic’ self (60). Biographies today
tender such titles as The Real Elvis, The Real Lennon. We live in a culture of

34. Page | 34
after-images, a reality saturated by ideals, idealisations and post-fantasies where
the reputation precedes the thing, and the image prescribes the seeing:
“I quickly introduced myself, or rather reintroduced myself, for under very
different circumstances, when Marco Polo was still a name and not yet a
fable, we'd met at Acre.” (61)
In a playfully philosophical fashion, Myself and Marco Polo confronts and further
problematizes the thorny concept of the ‘definitive’ biography: the search for the
real face beneath the mask. Readers of the novel are encouraged to ask just how
separable these two things are: just what constitutes the ‘real’ and just how
permanent can the real ever be?
Questions regarding the protean nature of reality and all social and life-
forms have dominated the modern consciousness since the time of Virginia Woolf
and D.H. Lawrence. Yet with the emergence of Foucaudian and Nietzschean
thought within mainstream popular culture the problem now seems to have
escalated. The individual is beginning to see themselves as little more than a
‘cultural artefact’ (62), and a range of anxieties have emerged as a consequence.
Stephen Greenblatt in his essay Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) vocalises his
own concerns:
“I perceived there were, so far as I could tell, no moments of pure,
unfettered subjectivity, indeed the human subject came to seem
remarkably unfree.” (63)

35. Page | 35
The human subject, as Greenblatt sees it, is an old disputed territory: claimed by
various rival nations or colonized by various majority groups. In this pessimistic
and deeply paranoid worldview, the individual is ideologically bound and gagged,
compelled to recycle those obscure influences and ‘machinations’ of a dominant
culture. History — the voice of the past — prescribes our way of seeing. All our
apparent subjective ‘choices’ are managed and produced culturally.
Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) tackles the issue of the colonized history head on.
This bleak yet mesmerising novel tells the story of the ‘remarkably unfree’ black
consciousness in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War.
In the novel Morrison addresses the present's enslavement to the past within the
context of the literalised slavery of Kentucky. It is the intention of the remaining
chapters to analyse in greater depth the multifarious nature of this issue.
Chapter 8
The Iron upon the Tongue
“... how offended the tongue is, held down by iron, how the need to spit is
so deep that you need to cry for it...the wildness that shot up into the eye
the moment the lips were yanked back.” (Beloved, p.71)
Sethe, the female slave within the novel, says 'definitions belong to the definers
not the defined' (p.190). The definers in this particular novel are, on the whole,
oppressive white males engaged in aggressive white male supremacy. As
Morrison sees it, even the very language that Sethe uses encodes a white-male

36. Page | 36
view of things. Sethe is, by her own admission, bound by a language that is not
her own. Her very consciousness like Polo's China is frustrated and inhibited by
an imperialist advance; only this time is at the level of discourse. To borrow a
phrase used by Michel Foucault in his inaugural lecture upon the ‘order of
discourse’ the black American consciousness is irrevocably contained within a
‘conceptual terrain’ that is both alien and hostile to it (64). Even at this early
stage, both the reader and the character have encountered an all consuming
anxiety of influence. We have no option but to recognise that every word that
Sethe utters is bound to an aggressive semantic paradigm that reproduces and
maintains the cultural dominance of white male America: she is contained within
its reality:
“Reality is construed out of the qualities of its language and its symbols.”
(Beloved, p.53)
Although Sethe and the novel make spirited attempts to subvert the traditional
order of a white-male discourse through emphasising and repeating ordinarily
subordinated experience — experience of pain, experience of nature — the
character is ultimately confined to the occupied territories of the word and within
the self-sustaining mechanisms of its meaning-making systems. Hers is a “self
that is no self”, a self that is shattered and fragmented, and this is reflected in both
the language and the disturbed narrative sequence throughout.
In Travels in Hyperreality (1983), Umberto Eco offers this timely
reminder: if power is immanent in language ‘it can never be a place of

37. Page | 37
revolution.’ (65) The knowledge encoded within its symbols and within the
‘qualities of its language’ (66) is predominantly white-male knowledge: there is
no freedom within the word. Louis Althusser in his essays on Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses (1969) offers a similarly pessimistic vision of our
past and future lives, conceding that the ruling class's domination over culture was
first installed ‘in words’. Morrison voices much the same concern in the book:
“Schoolteacher was teaching us things we couldn't learn.”
(Beloved, p.191)
Novelist and critic, Raymond Williams has likewise described education as a
‘particular selection, a particular set of emphases and omissions’ (67).
In Morrison’s novel, the knowledge the white man commits to the mind of the
slave is shown to be at odds with the shape and texture of their native African
consciousness; it does not in any way correspond to their own ‘emphases’ and
‘omissions’. They are contaminated with alien data. According to Althusser and
members of the New Left, the state apparatus of the school (68) interpellates the
individual making them dependent upon a system of knowledge and an entire
discursive framework. As on most occasions, the mouth can bite the hand that
feeds it. Even the simplest acts of communication are dominated by a system
controlled by the conquering force. Whether it is the crudest vocalisations relating
to want, or relating to need, or whether it emerges in more complex attempts to
make sense of ourselves and our worlds, we are dutifully bound by language.
Even attempts to define oneself in opposition to the dominant white male are

38. Page | 38
frustrated. Recognising one's own identity in the ‘language of the oppressor’ can
only reload those nodes and strategies deployed by the oppressor (69). Even so
much as a casual challenge restores the power dynamic in the oppressor’s favour.
The slave’s continuing bid for freedom backfires upon the individual. Michel
Foucault provides some clarity:
“Does the liberationist movement constitute a true opposition to the
machinery of power and the repression it operates, or does it, on the
contrary, form a part of the same historical network that condemns it?”
(70)
Like many forms of social ritual and communion the ideological initiate is
blackmailed into receiving the body and the blood of a dominant system and in
doing so betrays its own native instincts. Sethe's own sense of self-loathing and
self-betrayal is derived from what she sees as her complicity in this exchange: she
is compelled to reproduce the language of the ruling system, and in doing so,
reproduces the systems that keep those rulers in place. Her words belong to the
definers. Worse still, her words offer no small degree of consent:
“Power is reinforced by the complicity of those who are dominated ... it is
transmitted by and through them.” (Michel Foucault)
Even the freedom that Sethe desires operates within a specific semantic paradigm
that keeps the oppressors in place. Freedom is defined by the definers, it complies
with their specific rules, practices, and terms. The desire for freedom does not
exist as a ‘pre-social authenticity’; it is always in the servitude of ‘the very culture

39. Page | 39
which it also transgresses.' (72) True freedom, Sethe realises, is ‘having freedom
when it didn't mean a thing’ (Beloved p.25). It must exist outside of language and
even consciousness. Even the very notion of freedom itself is owned by the
dominant classes:
“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that self was
another.” (Beloved p.95)
If the individual human subject cannot experience, much less claim, an ‘authentic’
sense of self then whose history is it telling? Beloved in this way aggravates and
further problematizes the very notion of the nineteenth-century slave-narrative:
just whose story are they telling? Observing the black male slaves as they sit
about the fire swapping their own personal and imaginative histories, Sethe
arrives at an understanding of the nature and form of myth:
“They made up their tales, shaped and decorated them deliberately forgot
her.” (Beloved p.25)
In one swift descriptive stroke Morrison reveals the tragic complicity that
lies at the heart of the traditional slave-narrative. The tales the old men tell evolve
out of a White Male discourse concerning freedom and desire, but in doing so
they deprive themselves of an authentic Black consciousness. Their various tales
of loss and defeat are cut to the oppressive pattern that the American White Male
has provided. Even slave-history has been claimed. It is a stamp of disapproval
upon the heart of the former slave.

40. Page | 40
In this brave and compelling novel, Morrison sets out treat, and to some
extent repair, the lesions scored on the Black American consciousness by slavery
prior to and immediately after the American Civil War. For Morrison it’s a double
loss: Sethe has no story she can call her own, not just because she is black, but
because she is a woman. History has shown that for a culture to flourish it must
have its own precious and unique stories to tell. Sethe and women like her have
been denied that basic right and without a story, you have no history, and without
a history you have no future. And because of this, slavery continues to be
perpetuated (and resold) at the level of narrative today.
In one sense Morrison's novel sets out to retrieve a treasure-box of lost
experience. It is an account for the ‘unaccounted for’ — a history that has been
forgotten. We begin to see all that has been culturally and emotionally suppressed
begin to return:
“Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” (Beloved, p.35)
Whether referring to the child that Sethe has lost, or to that history so long
forgotten, giving birth to the past can be a painful and self-destructive process.
The cultural archive like the human psyche buckles under the enormous pressure
of something fresh and authentic breaking to the surface. It disrupts the modern
conscience. Sethe’s dead child, Beloved has not been forgotten, it has been
wilfully ‘disremembered’ - struck off the historical record. Black-history, so long
held captive in the imaginations and fantasies of the American public, at last
makes its fierce return, forging over the range of stereotypes — the Uncle Toms

41. Page | 41
the Nigger Jims — an authentic black identity. The novel exhumes a forgotten
history, an entire archive of lost material. The illegitimate nature of the child
Beloved provides in many respects a haunting analogue to the illegitimate nature
of so many ‘disremembered’ histories.
A Summation
It would appear that the New Historical writer has developed a committed interest
in another sort of reality: a discursive reality — the reality of the simulacrum.
Accepting non-so-gracefully the loss, or at the very least, the endlessly deferred
promise of a phenomenological moment, the New Historical writer grapples
obsessively with those images created in reality’s place; not the distorted truth of
conciliatory platonics but the crude synthetic truths manufactured by dominant
cultures: the stucco world of ideology. These novels hold a mirror up to the world
of signs as opposed to that of matter, existing simultaneously as celebrations and
laments.

42. Page | 42
REFERENCES
1. Oswald, John, Keyboard Magazine, 1988
2. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, Routledge, p.166.
3. Foucault, Michel, in Sexual Dissidence by Jonothan Dollimore, p.33.
4. The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985), p.332.
5. Eco, Umberto, in Postmodernist Fiction by Brian Mchale, p.16.
6. Linda Hutcheon, Paratextuality, 1986, p.4
7. Sherzer, Dina, Postmodernism and Feminisms in Postmodernism and
Contemporary Fiction, ed. Smyth, p.158.
8 Frederic Jameson, Cognitive Mapping
9. Howard, Jean.E, The New Historicism and Renaissance Studies in New
Historicism and Renaissance Drama, ed. Dutton & Wilson, p.25.
10. McHale, p.44.
11. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1971).
12. Michel Foucault, Des Espaces Autres
13. Foucault, Michel, in Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth by Alan Sheridan,
p.171.
14. ibid

43. Page | 43
15. ibid
16. Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p.250.
17. ibid
18. Howard, p.26.
19. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias
20. Marsden, Jean.E, The Appropriation of Shakespeare, p.1
21. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1970
22. Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations, p.7.
23. Eco, p.16.
24. White, Hayden, in New Historiscism and Renaissance Drama ed Dutton &
Wilson p.25.
25. ibid p.25.
26. ibid p.25.
27. Denzin, Norman. K. Interpretive Autoethnography
28. ibid
29. Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1970
30. White, Hayden, in New Historiscism and Renaissance Drama ed Dutton &
Wilson

44. Page | 44
31. Howard, Jane. E, The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies
32. ibid
33. Greenblatt, Stephen -
34. Sypher, Wylie. Loss of the self in Modern literature and Art
35. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, Routledge
36. White, Hayden, in New Historiscism and Renaissance Drama ed Dutton &
Wilson
36. Derrida, Jacques, in Myth, Truth, and Literature, by Falck , p.19.
37. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, Routledge
38. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, Routledge
39. McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, Routledge
40. Berman, Marshall, Politics of Authenticity, 1970
41. ibid
42. Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981
43. ibid
44. David E. Meyer and Roger Schvaneveldt, 1971
45. Jonathan Evans Biases In Human Reasoning, 1989/Jonathan Evans
Linguistic Factors in Reasoning, 1977

45. Page | 45
46. Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981
47. ibid
48. ibid
49. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p.255.
50. ibid
51. -
52. McLuhan, Marshall, The Medium is the Message, 1964
53. Derrida, Jacques, in Myth, Truth, and Literature, by Falck
54. Howard, p.23.
55. ibid p.23.
56. Source lost.
57. The Independent - a review.
58. Bowie, David, Newspaper Article.
59. Derrida, p20.
60. Dollimore, p.44.
61. Griffiths, Myself and Marco Polo, p.3.
62. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p.256.

46. Page | 46
63. ibid p.256.
64. Foucault, The Order of Discourse, p.49-50.
65. Eco, Umberto quoting Michel Foucault, Travels in Hyperreality, 1983
66. Foucault, The Order of Discourse, p.49-50.
67. Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society
68. Althusser, p.l.
69. Dollimore, p.171.
70. Foucault, in The Will to Truth by Alan Sheridan, p.169.
71. ibid p.171.
72. Dollimore, p.11