Denying history or defying History? John Fowles’s A maggot and the postmodernist novel

Abstract

This paper takes issue with accusations that postmodernist fiction neglects or refuses to engage with history. I offer a reading of John Fowles’s A maggot which demonstrates how postmodernist novels, by way of a self-reflexive interrogation of their own narrative foundation, contest history’s master status and expose the latter’s similar dependence on narrative modes of totalizing representation. Such a demystification process, I maintain, prompts a recognition of the provisional status of history as a human construct, thus undermining its power of totalization and opening it up to rewriting.