‘What to do with all this history?’ A novel (victorious dust) and critical commentary

Abstract

This thesis comprises a novel and critical commentary that explore history, narration and crisis in contemporary historical fiction. The novel, Victorious Dust, traces the lives of three generations of a Greek family from the end of the German occupation of Greece in 1944 until the eve of the 2015 bailout referendum. In doing so, it investigates and critiques various parallels drawn between the Greek Civil War (1943-1949) and the 2009 financial crisis. The novel meditates upon this particular historical analogy to ask wider questions about the role of the traumatic past in our (mis)understandings of the present, and whether, contrary to our belief in the ‘healing power’ of narration, it is the very narrative we make of history that perpetuates these traumas in the first place.
The critical commentary briefly explores the genesis of the novel in relation to the financial crisis and the historical context of the civil war. It situates the novel within a personal approach to creative writing that responds to established theoretical and close-reading practices in higher education, and argues for a fluid, non-rigorous engagement with both, as tools to assist, rather than direct, creativity. This position is demonstrated in the case study of the novel’s relationship to history and selected literary-theoretical arguments on historical representation.
Using the novel’s development to explore formal questions prompted by the meeting of history and fiction, the commentary situates the work in a wider context of haunting and the supernatural in contemporary anglophone fiction. The commentary offers a series of conclusions on core aspects of craft and method (research in historical fiction, plotting, and character development), notes the persistent effects of the traumatic/’heroic’ past and historical analogy on the present, and offers the novel as a distinct contribution to contemporary historical fiction.

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