After modernism: Representations of the past in the novels of Graham Swift

Graham Swift is among the most significant of a number of writers who emerged in Britain in the early 1980's to revitalize the English novel as a form capable of expressing late-twentieth-century concerns without abandoning its traditional roots. After providing a brief context for this development, this study delineates the influence of the contemporary English novel's often contentious parents--nineteenth-century realism and early twentieth century modernism--on Swift's development as a writer. Drawing on the work of various theorists of history and literature, I argue that his representations of an historical and literary past question traditional forms while, at the same time, rejecting the anti-representational impulse of some versions of postmodernism.; Chapter one outlines Swift's abiding concerns as they are revealed in his collection of short-stories, Learning to Swim. Chapter two discusses The Sweet-Shop Owner in conjunction with several exemplary modernist texts, and demonstrates the debt Swift's first novel owes to modernism generally. The next chapters delineate the postmodernist elements of his subsequent novels. I discuss Shuttlecock in terms of detective fiction, a focal point in various theories of the complex relationship between modernism and postmodernism. With Waterland, I argue that Swift refutes some of the assumptions on which positivist history is based, but he does not, unlike his narrator, condemn us to the quicksand of historical relativism. Out of this World, like so much postmodernist fiction and theory, critically examines the relationship between reality and its representation. I go on to show that, by juxtaposing contemporary concerns with those of the Victorians in Ever After, Swift once again examines the implications of reading the past, both as fiction and through fiction. My conclusion briefly discusses Swift's 1996 novel, Last Orders, a technically superb work that reaffirms his ties to the modernist tradition of Joyce and Faulkner, while turning away from the metacritical exploration of issues raised by postmodernism that marks its predecessors.