Three Approaches toward Historiography: The French Lieutenant's Woman, Possession, and Waterland

Critics have widely explored John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, Graham Swift's Waterland, and A. S. Byatt's Possession. These novels are generally treated as outstanding historiographic metafictions since they self-consciously adopt the notion of history and simultaneously problematize historical understanding. For Hayden White, the historian is inevitably impositional and every narrativized history is relative. Following White, Linda Hutcheon defines postmodern historical fiction as the type of fiction that self-reflexively and paradoxically makes use of the notion of history and simultaneously denies its truthfulness. The present article attempts to analyze, compare, and contrast John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, Graham Swift's Waterland and A. S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance in light of the theories of White and Hutcheon to show that in spite of problematization of the possibility of recovering the past as it actually was, these novels treat the concept of history differently.