England as a Palimpsest in Julian Barnes’s England, England. Turning History Into a Story

Elisabeta Simona Catană

doi:10.2478/rjes-2022-0007

.blurhash-client-img { display: none !important; }

England as a Palimpsest in Julian Barnes’s England, England. Turning History Into a Story

Romanian Journal of English Studies

Volume 19 (2022): Issue 1 (November 2022)

By: Elisabeta Simona Catană

Open Access

|Dec 2022

Abstract

This article analyses Julian Barnes’s England, England and shows that it recreates England as a palimpsest, presenting to us a parody of the past and circulating an ironic story of a possible version of this country with a rewritten history. Julian Barnes redefines history and the role of the historian in a novel which illustrates the idea that history is a story.

References

Bhabha, Homi K. 1990. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge.
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Barnes, Julian. 2012. England, England. London: Vintage Books.
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Cuddon, John A. 1999. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Revised by C.E. Preston. London: Penguin Books.
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Currie, Mark. 1998. Postmodern Narrative Theory. New York: Palgrave.10.1007/978-1-349-26620-3
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests. Literature in the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Holmes, Frederick M. 1997. The Historical Imagination: Postmodernism and the Treatment of the Past in Contemporary British Fiction. Founding Ed. Samuel L. Macey, General Ed. Robert M. Schuler. English Literary Studies Monograph Series, No. 73. Victoria: University of Victoria.
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge.
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Hutcheon, Linda. 2002 (1989). The Politics of Postmodernism. 2^nd edition. London and New York: Routledge.
Search in Google Scholar Back to article
Waugh, Patricia. 1984. Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London and New York: Routledge.10.2307/1771928
Search in Google Scholar Back to article

Articles in this issue

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/rjes-2022-0007 | Journal eISSN: 2286-0428 | Journal ISSN: 1584-3734

Journal RSS Feed

Language: English

Page range: 50 - 57

Published on: Dec 16, 2022

Published by: West University of Timisoara

In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

Publication frequency: 1 issue per year

Keywords:

England,

history,

nation,

palimpsest,

story

Related subjects:

Linguistics and semiotics,

Theoretical frameworks and disciplines,

Linguistics, other,

Germanic languages,

English

© 2022 Elisabeta Simona Catană, published by West University of Timisoara
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Volume 19 (2022): Issue 1 (November 2022)