Historiographic Metafiction in the "French Lieutenant’s Woman"

Özet

This paper deals with the question of historiographic metafiction in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The novel was published in 1969 and has since been considered as one of the most important works of British postmodernism, primarily because of the literary technique of metafiction that the author uses in his novel, but also because of the presence of a specific type of metafiction that deals with the treatment of past and historiography, or historiographic metafiction. Historiographic metafiction starts with the premise that it is impossible to fully grasp the past from the present perspective, so the goal of the novel of this genre is to question the recorded historical facts, the great historical stories, and the way they are presented in literature. In this paper we will research and give an overview of all the techniques that Fowles uses in order to achieve this goal.