Graham Swift's Waterland as historiographic metafiction

This thesis aims to analyze Graham Swift's Waterland as postmodernist historical novel in the light of Linda Hutcheon's concept of "historiographic metafiction". Principally, the concept of historiographic metafiction suggests that history is a construction and cannot present facts objectively. In the light of these ideas, the study argues that Graham Swift's Waterland undermines history as a grand narrative through the main character Tom Crick, who is a history teacher and the only narrator in the novel. As a self-reflexive narrator, in a self-referential text, Tom Crick primarily blurs the definitions of history, story, reality, progress and fairy-tale. Furthermore, his paradoxical accounts on the relevance of historical facts create confusion in the reader. His distortion of reality through his stories as a means of redemption does not prove to be helpful except for himself. Thus, it is questioned by the present study in what ways Tom Crick is an unreliable narrator and a true historian, and shown that historical facts are not represented objectively in Swift's postmodern historical fiction.