Telling the story of the past: History, identity, and community in fiction by Walter Scott, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Leslie Silko

This dissertation focuses on history as it is constructed through the storytelling situation in novels by Walter Scott, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Leslie Silko. All four novelists define themselves as belonging to groups marginalized by the dominant culture and use oral models of the transmission of history and storytelling to do so, emphasizing the primacy of speech over writing and the centrality of the body in the representation of history. The dissertation argues that the works of these writers are linked intertextually and historically: Scott created a seminal model of history grounded in the human voice that the other writers respond to and revise. Faulkner grew up in a South steeped in Scott; Faulkner's novels that register history in human consciousness serve as points of departure for Morrison and Silko's sophisticated contemporary versions of traditional oral histories. The dissertation begins by examining Scott's Old Mortality in light of the work of Hayden White, Louis Mink, and Mikhail Bakhtin, and considers Scott himself as a theorist of history and fiction. It describes Scott's profound effect on the shaping of nineteenth-century American fiction, and his legacy in the work of Faulkner, Morrison, and Silko. These novelists extend Scott's emphasis on the body and the spoken word at the center of historical representation to articulate theories of incarnate history in their novels. However, while Scott used a model of revolution and the wounded warrior's body as the central tropes of his historical novel, the twentieth-century American writers considered here use models of genealogy and the reproductive female body as the locus of history's embodiment. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theories of Jessica Benjamin, I argue that the storytelling situation itself--involving the reader as a living link in the reproduction of historical consciousness--is revised and reconfigured by the twentieth-century authors, moving from a model of complementarity and authority in Scott to a model of reciprocity and mutual re-creation in Morrison and Silko.