This dissertation argues that a "postmodernist historical novel" (1) incorporates the fragmentation of postmodernist texts while (2) paradoxically predicating itself upon a totalizing historical construct and (3) textualizing history as synchronic and spatial, instead of diachronic and linear. The thesis examines the postmodernist novel's relation to an established genre other than SF or detective fiction--the historical novel.;Chapter 1 briefly summarizes current approaches to postmodernism in criticism, discusses Joseph Frank's spatial form theory in relation to modernist and postmodernist historical fiction, and defines the postmodernist historical novel against other kinds of postmodernist fiction, specifically, postmodern realism.;Chapter 2 compares definitions by Fleishman, Lukacs, Manzoni, Henderson, and Cowart of the traditional historical novel. Examples of the traditional historical novel show it inscribing causality, linearity, progressivism and positivism: even though the present may be chaotic, the future will either reassert order or explode history through an apocalyptic cleansing. The traditional historical novel implies a real, millennial, and progressive history. In contrast, the postmodernist historical novel radically upsets linearity and disrupts readers' trust in temporal history as an epistemologically secure construct. The postmodernist historical novel (1) views history as narrative or fields of discourse; (2) is metaphoric rather than metonymic and posits synchronic history; (3) replaces progress with repetition and causality with chance, upsetting narrative conventions that imply historical linearity and comprehensibility; (4) denies that historical "truth" operates through causal process by a determinable rationale, and thus (5) subverts the traditional genre. Briefly discussed are novels by Lampedusa, Vidal, Christa Wolf, Dos Passos, and Graham Swift.;Chapters 3 and 4 newly define two kinds of postmodernist spatialization of history. Chapter 3 defines "paratactic history" and discusses work by Barnes, Berger, Boyle, Ackroyd, and Fowles. Chapter 4 defines "simultaneous history" against fictional surrealism, creative anachronism, and fictional heterotopias. Discussed are works by Reed, Barth, Coover, Thomas, Rushdie, and Pynchon.;Chapter 5 pairs work by Thomas Kuhn and Gunter Grass, Hayden White and Ishmael Reed to contextualize the postmodernist historical novel. The Conclusion argues the anarchic (versus revolutionary) impulses of the postmodernist historical novel.
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