dc.contributor.author | Aguilar Osuna, Juan Jesús | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2022-11-07T11:53:23Z | |
dc.date.available | 2022-11-07T11:53:23Z | |
dc.date.issued | 1999 | |
dc.identifier.issn | e-2530-8335 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/30487 | |
dc.description.abstract | Waterland is one of the best representatives of the postmodern idea
of history. It displays a concern for the end of history understood in traditional
terms, and presents an alternative based on a mixture of official,
personal, and natural (hi)story/-ies and even fairy-tales. The making of
history and the construction of the self (exemplified by Tom Crick) are
equated with the process of land reclamation in the East Anglian Fens,
and, therefore, displayed as labours with only temporary validity. This
loss of fixed mainstays that can support master-histories and solid selves
—which would create illusions of static pasts— is understood as pessimistic
by those who do not partake of the postmodern fundamentals.
However, Swift’s message in Waterland is optimistic, for he understands
this temporariness of man’s reconstructions of the/his past as liberating.
He insists in the necessity of avoiding oppressive closures that make us
prisoners of an overly rigid past. Thus, man’s reclamation of (hi)story/-
ies and of the/his past are displayed as unfulfilled fulfilments which allow
us to go on feeding on a liberating curiosity that helps us to make
constant “improvisations upon reality”. In Waterland, only those characters
who abandon curiosity, Mary (Tom’s wife) and Dick (his brother),
are flawed, for they have not learnt “a way of giving reality the slip”. | en_EN |
dc.language.iso | en | es_ES |
dc.relation.ispartofseries | Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses Año 1999, n. 38, pp. 183-194; | |
dc.rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional | * |
dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ | * |
dc.title | Graham Swift's Waterland: The Pessimistic End of History, or the Optimistic Reclamation of (Hi)story/-ies | en_EN |
dc.type | info:eu-repo/semantics/article | |
dc.rights.accessRights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess | es_ES |
dc.type.hasVersion | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion | es_ES |