Memory, History and Narrative

Two of the most commonly studied novels for AQA's Modern Times option — Graham Swift's Waterland (1983) and Michael Frayn's Spies (2002) — are centrally concerned with the relationship between memory, history, and narrative. Both novels ask: can we trust our memories? Can we trust the stories we tell about the past? And what happens when the boundaries between history and fiction dissolve?

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Historiographic Metafiction

Both Waterland and Spies belong to a literary mode that the critic Linda Hutcheon has called historiographic metafiction — fiction that is simultaneously about history and about the process of writing history. These novels do not simply tell stories set in the past; they interrogate how we construct, narrate, and understand the past.