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“You will see the logic of the design of this”: From Historiography to Taxonomography in the Contemporary Metafiction of Sarah Waters’s Affinity
- Author(s):
- Martin Paul Eve (see profile)
- Date:
- 2013
- Group(s):
- LLC 20th- and 21st-Century English and Anglophone
- Subject(s):
- Education, Higher, British literature, English literature
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- neo-Victorian, contemporary literature, Sarah Waters, Academe
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6530Q
- Abstract:
- Although, in some ways, Sarah Waters’s Affinity looks akin to historiographic metafiction, Marie-Luise Kohlke has persuasively argued that the text is more accurately dubbed “new(meta)realism”, a mode that demonstrates the xhausted potential of the form. This article suggests that genre play and a meta-generic mode, dubbed taxonomography, might be a further helpful description for the mechanism through which Waters’s novel effects its twists and pre-empts the expectations of an academic discourse community. This reading exposes Waters’s continuing preoccupation with the academy but also situates her writing within a broader spectrum of fiction that foregrounds genre as a central concern. Ultimately, this article asks whether Waters’s novel can, itself, be considered as a text that disciplines its own academic study in the way that it suggests that the academy has become, once more, blind to class.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
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