Mary Metcalf s Attempt at Reclamation: Maternal Representation in Graham Swift s Waterland
Mary Metcalf s Attempt at Reclamation: Maternal Representation in Graham Swift s Waterland
复制标题
玛丽·梅特卡夫的垦荒尝试：格雷厄姆·斯威夫特《沃特兰》中的母亲代表
DOI：
10.1080/00497870310082
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发表时间：
2003
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
K. Powell
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
K. Powell
Graham Swift’s Waterland has recently been discussed as an example of a postmodern text in which the narrative structure calls into question the notions of history, the past, storytelling, and their impact on the present. The complexity of the stories of the past and how they explain the narrator’s present is explicitly addressed in Tom Crick’s autobiographical narrative. Crick’s explicit construction of history mirrors Swift’s implicit construction of the novel: the stories Crick tells revolve and overlap—defying the traditional linear construction of stories employed to “keep reality under control” ( Janik 83). While simultaneously emphasizing the need to tell stories to shape our responses to history and consequently maintain reality, Swift also questions stories’ ability to represent the past. Crick’s “return” to “previous representations,” that is, the stories of his past, suggests the revolving, rather than linear, nature of storytelling. As such, Waterland is a parody of a Victorian autobiography, and an example of an historiographic metafiction that openly problemetizes the traditional construction of stories (Landow 204; Hutcheon 47). Swift’s narrative seemingly balances the necessity of telling stories to control reality against the inability of stories to
