Enquiring History And Deconstructing Macro-Narrative

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is one of the most attractive works of Julian Barnes. In this book, Barnes continues to use postmodern writing techniques, such as: parody, collage, marginal and multiple voices to perfectly manifest the characteristics of historiographic metafiction. This thesis is guided by Linda Hutcheon's theory of historiographic metafiction. Through the analyses of the use of these techniques, this thesis reveals that the author on the one hand installs history, on the other hand, throws doubt on history. And that history is uncertain, subjective and nonlinear. Consequently, the meta-narrative is subverted.This thesis is composed of three parts. The first part-introduction provides a brief description of Julian Barnes and A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, and summarizes the literature review by previous scholars, and offers a brief introduction of Linda Hutheon's historiographic metafictional theory. The second part includes three body chapters: the first chapter is about the analysis of the parody of genre, religion and politics in this book; the second chapter focuses on the analysis of the technique-collage; and the third chapter studies how the writer utilizes multiple and marginal voices to deconstruct meta-history and macro-narrative. The third part concludes that through the use of parody, collage and multiple voices, Barnes successfully conveys that although history exists, it is not obtainable, and that the so-called history is subjective and textualized. The History becomes various histories.