Introduction

Abstract

The introduction begins by surveying existing accounts of the postwar novel as defined by a turn to historiographic metafiction and its staging of postmodernism’s ‘end of history’. It then draws on theorists of historiography’s recent temporal turn—Reinhart Koselleck, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and François Hartog—to argue for conceptualizing history not only as a textual representation but also as a multiplicity of ways of experiencing lived temporality. Turning to debates in narratology about the novel as a means of mediating temporal experience, as well as theorizations of the temporal dimensions of aesthetic form, it argues that the novel’s capacity to mediate experiences of time through narrative form and literary style enables it to express the many temporalities through which historical change takes place.