Allegories of telling: Self-referential narrative in contemporary British fiction

This thesis analyzes contemporary British novels in terms of their latent theorization of the relation between narrative and various extratextual "realities." The texts' allegorical material is brought to light through two interrelated methods: the extrapolation of embedded passages with self-referential implications; and the application of metanarratives, intrinsic to the texts themselves, that serve as hermeneutic "master codes." This approach reveals the predominant issues raised by recent British fiction: the role of the self-conscious reader; the contemporary British novel's intertextual relations with its realist and modernist precursors; and the representational potential of postmodern historiographic fiction.;Drawing on Ross Chambers' Story and Situation, Chapter One shows how scenes of narrative seduction in John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman posit a specific readerly stance capable of recognizing the novel's realignment of its contemporary audience's taste to a hybrid form combining realist readability with the modernist and experimentalist tendencies which had fallen into disfavour in post-war Britain.;Using psychoanalytic theory and Paul de Man's treatment of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Chapter Two examines how Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman reworks its key modernist intertext to create a postmodern "allegory of reading" designed to block readerly narcissism and encourage self-conscious engagement.;Chapter Three performs parallel interpretations of Graham Swift's Waterland based on Freudian theories of trauma and Walter Benjamin's notion of redemptive history to divulge narrative's ability to facilitate revised understandings of the past in a medium that reconciles realist referentiality and modernist textual autonomy.;Chapter Four refutes Fredric Jameson's attack on postmodern cultural depthlessness by reading passages from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Midnight's Children as allegories respectively of the significance of overt intertextuality and the power of contemporary historiographic fiction to induce renewed awareness of historical reality.;Throughout the study, this allegorical method demonstrates that the texts thematize issues in ways different from those presupposed by standard interpretations of them as postmodern metafiction.