Reflections of historiographic metadrama in Tom Stoppard's Travesties, Arcadia, Indian Ink and Invention of Love

With the emergence of postmodern theory, certainties about historical knowledge have been challenged in the second half of the twentieth century. This thesis seeks to demonstrate how postmodernism has contributed to contemporary drama by problematizing the narration of past events with the help of metadramatic techniques in Tom Stoppard?s plays. His plays portray this difficulty by drawing attention to the constructedness of both history and fiction by depicting unreliable characters as narrators of the past.Accordingly, the thesis first discusses the transformation of historiography and its reflections on historiographic metadrama. This part is followed by a brief survey of postmodernity together with its consequences in the world. Thus, it aims to display how certain opinions about the world have changed. In order to acknowledge these changes and their effects on contemporary drama, a general view of postmodernism is given together with major postmodern theorists. By using Travesties, Invention of Love, Indian Ink and Arcadia as primary texts, this thesis attempts to display the metadramatic elements that are applied in these texts. With the use of these metadramatic devices, this thesis also indicates that the reader?s role in creating the text is significant.By displaying the unreliable narrators as well as the intertextual allusions in these texts, this thesis aims to point out to the fictionality of the plays, and how they have become puzzle-like structures with the help of Tom Stoppard?s creative intellect.