Fiction and the Incompleteness of History: Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri

by Ying Zhu

Overview

With reference to Paul Ricoeur's conception of the interconnectedness of history and fiction, this comparative literary study examines narrative strategies that three contemporary writers of fiction - Toni Morrison, V. S. Naipaul, and Ben Okri - have devised to counteract the incompleteness of historical representation. In her novel Beloved Morrison redefines the slave-narrative tradition and reveals an alternative history of slavery by unveiling the interior lives of her characters. Through a hybrid prose that mixes fiction with history in the novels The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, Naipaul illuminates areas of darkness in the diasporic world of East Indian Trinidadians and provides new ways of transforming English literary and cultural history. Focusing on West African identity and community, Okri brings a mythic and fantastic dimension to postcolonial fiction as a way of giving a voice to people who are generally without power and almost without any place in a world of inequality and injustice. Probing into historical incompleteness, this study underscores the indispensable role of fiction in representing life, rectifying history, and enlarging reality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783039107469
Publisher:	Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Publication date:	01/09/2007
Edition description:	1ST
Pages:	162
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.66(h) x (d)

About the Author

The Author: Zhu Ying received her BA and M.A. in English Language and Literature from Wuhan University in the People's Republic of China. She completed her Ph.D. in English Literary Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is currently teaching and working for the American Studies Program in the Department of English at East China Normal University in Shanghai. Her research interests are contemporary fiction, critical theories, postcolonial studies, and African American and American literature.

Table of Contents

Contents: Introduction: imagining and repatterning the incompleteness of history – A shadowless participation: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and discredited history – A little chasm filled: the transformation of history in V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World – An undiscovered continent: Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and the enlargement of historical reality.