History, Storytelling, and Narrative Construction of Reality inGraham Swift’s Waterland

This paper discusses the ways in which Graham Swift's Waterland, like other works of historiographic metafiction, thematizes the problem of historiography as narrative construction of the past guided by certain rules and conventions. Waterland demonstrates how thin the boundary between history and stories can possibly become, while resisting the postmodern temptation of equating historiography with fiction. Comparisons to two other works of historiographic metafiction, Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger and Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, are made where appropriate to illustrate how the level of present dominates over the actual story of the past in historiographic metafiction and to support the paper’s claim that by questioning the objectivity of history such novels do not aim to erase the boundary between factual and fictional narration.