Revisiting The Past:the Historical And Memorial Theme In Penelope Lively’s Fiction

Penelope Lively(1933-), the contemporary British writer, was first known mainly as a children’s writer prior to her winning the1987Booker Prize with her widely praised novel Moon Tiger(1987). The Road to Lichfield, published in1977, is her first adult novel which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Treasures of Time (1979), her second adult novel, was the winner of Great Britain’s first National Book Award for fiction in1980and the Arts Council National Book Award. In many of her novels, Lively employs quaint village settings, peoples them with such traditional British types as vicars, spinsters, and committee-attending housewives, and constructs plots that reveal her strong interest in history and in the natural world. Because of these features, the blurbs on her book jackets frequently liken her to Jane Austen and Barbara Pym.In her literary fictions, Lively interweaves the present and the past--history, the public, collective past, and memory, the private and personal past--together with the application of various narrative techniques, such as flashback, stream of consciousness, psychological time, etc. A predominant theme running through her literary world is her consistent focus on history and memroy. By applying Louis A. Montrose’s "historicity of texts and textuality of history", Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon’s assumptions of history and some notions of New Historicists in my close reading of The Road to Lichfield(1977), Treasures of Time (1979) and Moon Tiger(1987), I intend to study Penelope Lively’s understanding and interpretation of the past, and draw this conclusion:Although a complete understanding of history is impossible, yet as we realize our subjectivity and misunderstanding of the past we can try to understand it in a new way and integrate the past into the present life to lead a better life.