Romances of the archive often present a past inflected less by academic history than by British heritage. In Jonathan Raban's words, this heritage (so often substituted for history by Margaret Thatcher and her followers) means 'something we have possession of after the death of the original owners' that we are 'free to use ... as we choose' (Mrs. Thatcher 24). The history invoked by romances of the archive is predominantly a usable past, so this book also confronts fictional representations of the past that, from a postmodern perspective, seem conservative, nostalgic, defen-sive, or insufficiently sceptical about finding the truth. [5].
Links to Related Material
- Postimperial Romances of the Archive
- The Romance of the Archive: Some Examples
- Postimperial Decline, the Romance of the Archive, and the Recovered past
- The Suez Crisis and Postimperialist Fiction
- History, Heritage, and Secondary School National Curriculum in the United Kingdom, 1970-2000
- The Postimperial British Debate over History versus Heritage
- The Romance of the Archive vs the Academic Novel
Bibliography
Keen, Suzanne. Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2001.
Raban, Jonathan. God , Man, and Mrs Thatcher (Chatto Counterblasts, No. 1). London: Chatto & Windus, 1989.
Last modified 8 August 2009