In the canon's mouth: Rhetoric and narration in historiographic metafiction (J. M. Coetzee, South Africa, Peter Carey, Australia, Salman Rushdie, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Laurence Sterne)

This project is a comparative rhetorical analysis of the range of formal and rhetorical strategies deployed by twentieth-century revisitings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British canonical novels. J. M. Coetzee's Foe, Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children take up explicitly postcolonial concerns and/or events by revisiting and politicizing elements of, respectively, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Roxana, Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. All three engage with the how of the narrative, the discourse, as well as the what of the narrative, the story. All fall into the category of what Linda Hutcheon calls historiographic metafiction: self-reflexive fictions that also incorporate historical figures and events, and that both rely on and reconfigure familiar representations of the past.; Previous accounts of historiographic metafiction have treated it as an intratextual phenomen rather than as a product of rhetorical transactions between writers and readers: authors manipulate specific narrative features to produce effects on or in collaboration with an audience. Rhetoric encompasses both the narrative strategies by which authors communicate with audiences and the purposes for which they do so; it is the point of contact between narratology and politics. The novels' formal features, especially the authors' choices about narration, construct and instruct the authorial audience.; Chapter 1 discusses Coetzee's substitution of fragmentary narratives, in different modes from or implying different points of view, for Defoe's univocal narration. Chapter 2 takes up Carey's separation of author, narrator, and protagonist---three kinds of agency that Dickens's novel aligns---into three different characters with different agendas. Chapter 3 examines Rushdie's adoption and modification of Sterne's digressive style, his breakdown of classical autodiegesis as a way of reimagining history. The contemporary works in various ways reveal, contest, augment, and complement the assumptions and procedures that the earlier works had, in the process of becoming canonical, naturalized.