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This dissertation argues that postmodern American fiction has strategically performed a series of rewritings. These range from a blurring of boundaries between author, narrator, and text that demonstrates the power of fiction (and calls attention to itself as such) to later pastiches of existing texts and styles. Another form of rewriting that occurs is a combination of these methods that also evokes the idea of truth and its conversion into the fictive. Meditations on history, how it is written and processed, and the kinds of narratives that have emerged as reliable, true, and “correct ” are important features of this genre. Postmodern writers who deal with the historical past and engage with, rewrite, and subvert the historical fiction genre find themselves navigating boundaries. Concerned with the longing for a tangible and “knowable ” history, they write to fill its absence. I am concerned with how these texts use postmodernist and metafictional strategies to explore the past and what it means to us in the present, especially with regard to the textuality of history itself. Each of my chapters seeks out exemplary texts of a stage in the evolution o