Theorising creative processes in the writing of the neo-historical fiction watermarks

In this dissertation, aspects of the creative process involved in `writing the past' are theorised from the site of practice, from the viewpoint of the empirical author. Certain poststructuralist and postmodernist discourses, however, have problematised and de-stabilised the concepts of `history' and the `past', and called into question the unitary and authoritative nature of `truth', `knowledge' and `reality'. These contestings of the ontological status of `history' have alerted us to the importance of previously marginalised perspectives on historical `reality', especially those relating to gender, race and religion.This situation presents considerable challenges to the writer of historical fiction and the historian alike, rendering it difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct the `past' without irony. In the light of a general `crisis of representation', fiction purporting to deal with an increasingly elusive `past' can no longer proceed in the relatively uncomplicated manner of the traditional historical novel, with its emphasis on sustaining the referential illusion of the empirical `past', as though the `truth' of `past events' could be revealed `as it really was'.Some of the options for re-writing history figurally are considered, and my novel Watermarks situated within them as a blend of traditional historical fiction, neo-historical or revisionary fiction, and the more extreme or satirical forms of historiographic metafiction which radically revise, challenge or subvert established ways of `writing the past'. The focus of the latter two forms is not so much on history as objective facts and artifacts, as on the pluralistic, and sometimes relativistic, concept of history as perspective(s).The dissertation explores the genesis of Watermarks, the theoretical and practical implications of writing a neo-historical fiction, the difficulties of `writing the past', and the fictional strategies employed to address them. The metafictional strategies of framed narratives or inset tales, multiple (and sometimes unreliable) narrators, and transformative repetitions of prior texts (intertextuality) are examined in the light of Bakhtin's concept of the "dialogic of the imagination", and are shown to be an important means by which past worlds may be established and at the same time subverted in the discourse of the novel.Each of these strategies re-affirms a view of `history' and the `past' as a matter of mediated and provisional `truths'. The role of intertextuality in particular is examined at length, firstly in terms of its theoretical implications for the traditional view of the author as originator of the text, and secondly in practical terms as an important means of producing a multivocal, interrogative text, a vital source of the diverse `languages' which characterise the discourse of the novel