Postcolonialism and the historical novel : allegorical realism and contemporary literature of the past in Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

The historical novel is one of the most prominent modes of contemporary writing in the former British Empire, yet the genre's postcolonial variant has not been the subject of critical analysis in its own right. This neglect can be explained by the dominance of a "resistance paradigm" in postcolonial studies, which tends to equate realism with naive mimesis and thus treats the historical novel as either a vehicle for imperialist ideology or a site of discursive conflict over the meaning of the past. As a result, the genre's epistemological and aesthetic complexities have been marginalised. This thesis responds to this neglect by critically analysing examples of the historical novel published since 2000 in Nigeria, Australia, and New Zealand. Historicised close analysis reveals that notwithstanding the anti-mimetic presumptions of much contemporary postcolonial criticism, and despite differences arising from contextual particularities, these texts are shaped by a common "realist impulse" that frames their narratives as defensible interpretations of the past. This ethical obligation to evidence-based interpretation has formal and epistemological consequences that manifest in an aesthetic framework I call allegorical realism. This term names a mode of representation in which fictional elements oscillate between ontological and conceptual registers in ways that simultaneously produce empathetically-unsettling relations to imagined individuals and interpretations of macro-historical change. This combination of affect and abstraction defines the genre as one based neither around assumptions about the transparency of language, nor overly pessimistic views that knowledge of the past is unachievable. I show that focusing analysis on allegorical realism allows critical attention to move away from its exclusive concern with textual resistance and instead explore how the genre is inflected by the various narratives it mediates and the specificities of postcolonial contexts. This research identifies three main variants of the contemporary postcolonial historical novel, each characterised by a different modulation of allegorical realism. Settler allegory comprises texts like Kate Grenville's The Secret River (2005) and Fiona Kidman's The Captive Wife (2006), in which colonists' alienation from occupied territory is reflected formally in the undercutting of allegorical procedures that align imaginary characters with their settings. Transnational historical novels, by contrast, stretch the spatio-temporal coordinates of allegorical realism to encompass processes taking place in global settings. This generates aesthetic effects that link apparently dissimilar novels like Witi Ihimaera's The Trowenna Sea (2009) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Finally, melancholy realism describes texts like Chris Abani's Song for Night (2007) and Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish (2001)-texts which disrupt the boundaries between past and present to unsettle postcolonial complacency. Tracing allegorical realism across these modes reveals how postcolonial concerns continue to recreate the genre, and how the oscillation of the allegorical signifier can challenge dominant accounts of historical change. The genre provides a significant archive for exploring how postcolonial literature is characterised by disjunctive temporalities irreducible to dominant narratives of modernity, while nonetheless being shaped by processes that link the globalised world. Show more