Metahistorical narratives and scientific metafictions: A critical insight into the twentieth-century poetics

With Metahistorical Narratives and Scientific Metafictions: A Critical Insight into the Twentieth-Century Poetics Giuseppe Episcopo has edited an inspiring collection of essays which succeeds in engaging the reader in a thought-provoking discussion on issues currently at the core of literary debates about contemporary fiction and its roots in other fields of knowledge. The volume represents an illuminating study of classic notions pertaining to the metahistorical nature of contemporary narratives but here refreshed with metafictional approaches to scientific discourse. Despite Episcopo’s title for his foreword —“an untimely beginning”— , Metahistorical Narratives and Scientific Metafictions is a timely book for two main reasons. On the one hand, the collection evidences the present importance of the postmodern cultural turn in the understanding of history and problematization of historiography (White 1981). However, the different papers extend their historiographic focus on the literary production of the late twentieth century, also dealing with issues concerning the categories of time and space, and exploring their implications for historical structures and their representability (...