Julian Barnes General Overview English Literature Essay

Julian Barnes was born in Leicester in 1946. A decade later, the family included an older brother, moved to Northwood, a suburb northwest of London. From 1957 to 1964, he was a student at the City of London School in London, commuting via the Underground. That experience gave him the title for his first novel, Metroland, a story of adolescence and coming of age in suburbia. His parents both taught French, a probable source of his deep and ongoing interest in France, French authors, and French history. At eighteen, Julian Barnes went to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied modern languages, visited Russia and taught English at a Catholic school in France before graduating with honors in 1968. He prepared for a career in law, but it never materialized, though he qualified as a barrister after studying law from 1972-74. Instead, he joined the staff at The Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked for three years as a lexicographer. In 1977, Barnes started his work as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesmen and the New Review. He worked as a television critic from 1979 to 1986, first for the New Statesmen and then for the Observer (London), as well as a restaurant column for The Tatler. Barnes has written for The New York Review of Books. For several years in the 1990s Barnes was the London correspondent for The New Yorker, writing about politics, the Royal Family, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and more.

Barnes has published twenty books, two collections of short stories, a translation, three collections of essays, four detective novels, ten novels, and a collection of German cartoons. His themes include: history, reality, the interplay of life and art, truth, love and death. Barnes has been married to Pat Kavanagh, his agent, since 1979, they have childless, and they live in North London. A self-described journalist, the lexicographer, critic, translator and essayist became a novelist in 1980 at age 34 with the publication of Metroland. Barnes believes one third of Metroland draws directly from his experience, but the rest of his work should not be considered autobiographical. His four detective novels, featuring a bisexual former police officer named Nick Duffy, were published next, under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. These exciting detective novels took just three to four weeks to write. The four books are similar, following a reasonably conventional plot-driven formula, though they are more atmospheric than many examples of the genre. But that was the end of writing the same book twice, a strategy antithetical to Barnes’s artistic and professional commitment. It is his mission to move forward with each novel he writes, not just with respect to his own work, but in regard to the form itself. His books are often very different from one another, demanding different technical solutions to different formal and thematic questions. This experimentation has led some critics to argue some of his books are not novels, to which he replies that if he says they are novels, so they are novels.

Some of his novels are not chronological or even linear; they can not seem to tie into a unified whole, though there is a thematic consistence. Merritt Moseley, a professor and literary critic writing in 1997 about the first ten novels, believed love, especially marital love, was Barnes’s focus. In the subsequent decade, Barnes’s theme is death, a topic he had introduced even in his first novel. This seems strange to Novel Club readers introduced to Barnes through his ninth novel, England, England, a comic piece.

Before She Met Me, was published in 1982, is Barnes’s second novel published under his own name, explores a husband’s intense feelings of jealousy about the love affairs his wife had before she met him. Merritt Moseley, calls it “a credible and compelling study of abnormal psychology … and of normal psychology” (Moseley, 65).

Flaubert’s Parrot, was published in 1984. It was short listed for the Booker and won for Barnes the Prix Medicis in 1986, a prize given to a French author and traditionally awarded for non-fiction. Staring at the Sun followed in 1986. It is about the long life of an ordinary woman, who “throughout her life, … learns to question the world’s idea of truth while she explores the beauty and miracles of everyday life” (www.julianbarnes.com,books).

Next, in 1989, came A History of the World in 10.1/2 Chapters in which Barnes deviates from the standard structure for a novel. The first chapter is about Noah’s ark, the last half chapter a disquisition on love. It is the combination of fictional and historical stories that provides Barnes the leisure to ask people’s ideas of history. In Barnes’s review in the Observer, 10.1/2 Chapter or half-chapter was said as an iconoclastic part of the novel to be read.

His sixth book, Talking It Over, was published in 1991 which takes Barnes to a more ordinary novelistic topic, a love triangle. He returns to the trio involved again in his tenth novel, Love, Etc. In 2001, Barnes’s seventh novel, The Porcupine, is again somewhat out of the ordinary. It is a story about the criminal trial of a communist dictator after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

Cross Channel, a book of stories, looks at the differences and similarities between French and British culture. Something to Declare, published a few years later, is a set and miscellany of essays on the issue and subject of France and French culture which has been written by Barnes over the twenty years before. Subjects contain the Tour de France, French food, and, certainly, Gustave Flaubert. While doing research on Flaubert, Barnes learned that the notes Alphonse Daudet wrote about his experience with syphilis, The Land of Pain, had never been translated, and he set about correcting that in 2002. It is his only published work of translation, and it covers a topic which appears again in his next book, The Lemon Table, a collection of stories about aging and dying published in 2004. The title refers to a table in a restaurant in Helsinki that Sibelius and his friends frequented; those who sat at this table. In fact, they were obliged to talk about death.

Arthur & George which was published in 2006, is another based on history. It is about detective novelist Arthur Conan Doyle’s role in getting a judgment reversed in a shameful case of miscarriage of justice. A Parsee solicitor from Birmingham, George Edalji, is convicted of mutilating farm animals, a crime he did not commit. Barnes discovered in Doyle’s autobiography and related texts, that Doyle fell in love with a younger woman other than his wife.

His next book, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, was published in March 2008. This novel is about the family diaries, and an exchange with Barnes’s brother, a reflection on the fear of death, a festival of art, a discussion with/to and about God, and a bow down before the French writer named Jules Renard.

Barnes has gotten several awards and honors for his masterful writing including the Somerset Maugham Award (Metroland 1981), two Booker Prize nominations (Flaubert’s Parrot 1984, England, England 1998); Geofry Faber Memorial Prize (FP 1985); Prix Medicis (FP 1986); E. M. Forster Award (American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters,1986); Gutenberg Prize (1987); Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italy, 1988); and the Prix Femina (Talking It Over 1992). Barnes was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004. In 1993 he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation and in 2004 won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

II.Statement of the Problem

The purpose of the present thesis tries to investigate the two novels The Porcupine and Arthur & George by Julian Barnes under the light of Historio-graphic Meta-fictional approach under Linda Hutcheon’s Parodic Historical Fictional theories. These two novels embrace the different disorderly literary and historical genres including criminal trial, law-suits, traditional, mysterious, masterful, historical, objective, subjective, and irony. All the chapters contain different narrative forms, that is; each passage and chapter dominated by a particular narrator. Some chapters are essentially based on meta-fictional events while some based on factual events. In fact, these two novels are basically the combination of fact and fiction when the thesis has to seek the formation of the reality and truth through the imagination.

The researcher argues that making a choice of the historio-graphic meta-fictional landscape is much attractive and instructive; indeed, it should be declared, the researcher uses self-reflexivity, parodic inter-textuality and self-conscious aspect of history as the fundamental factors of the approach which are the basic features of Julian Barnes’s novels by which and within which the researcher discovers the real world-history and falsifies the history; on the other hand, the researcher elaborates the function of the approach, its extension, and the relevant various and diverse theories in order to get the discovery and objective witnessing. In fact, parody and self-reflexivity both conservate and revolutionize, inter-textuality deals with openness, incompleteness, disintegrated-ness, and plurality of meaning, and at last, the self-consciousness reveals changing of reality.

It is stated, Julian Barnes uses different narrative techniques of historio-graphic meta-fiction including self-consciousness or meta-fiction, real and imaginary actions and objects, discursive formation, occasion, settings of scenes, inter-textualization, structure, inter-contextualization, a collage of scenes, and free and embedded indirect discourses to achieve an effect.

During the work, the researcher confronts a series of certainties and uncertainties of factual and fictional data and issues which can easily lead the researcher to get confused, but by the end the researcher who has had the primary acquaintance of historical background of the same real objective chapters, may find the way to solve the riddle and get the right answers. Therefore, the researcher gets the answers of the following questions via working and researching through the elements of the approach:

1.How does the process of the whole history function through these two novels?

2.How does the power of love act through the two novels?

3.In what way, does the reader prove the whole world-history may not be completely subjective?

4.How can the reader realize the coming of the formation of narrativization in Julian Barnes’s novels?

5.What factors may constitute the reader’s understanding towards the real truth in these two novels?

6.Why and how do these two novels attract their readers to the world of wonders?

7.What influence does the human leave on history?

8.What are the notions of these two novels in the reader’s opinion?

9.What symbols are there in these two novels?

10.How does the reader find the boundary between real and unreal situations through these two great novels?

11.How does the self-consciousness or meta-fictional dimensions become centre of attention in these two novels?

12.In what sense, does the reader attach the irrelevant and disparate sections in order to reach the unique truth in these two novels of Julian Barnes?

III.Significance of the Study

The researcher is curious of old-historicism and new-historicism and their analogy either in the real world or in the world of literature; the researcher is more curious of the howness of this approach, its applying in every genre especially in historical and new-historical contextualization and inter-contextualization, and its extension. It helps the researcher initiate the world-history and life to acquaint the analepses and prolepses to show the researcher’s investigative skills to the readers whom are made to understand the combination of fact and fiction and the art of Historio-graphic Meta-fiction as the great craft and aesthetic approach everywhere. Such a study gives opportunity to the readers to analyze the whole world-history either objectively or subjectively at last culminates into personal judgment and individual ideology subjectively.

These novels are investigated by the researcher and made known to the readers which make the readers be active and conscious of the whole history while is being mixed by reality and fictionality, and be full of emotions and go hilariously into rhapsodies. The thesis introduces both history as a particular discursive discipline and history as the actual events this discipline investigates. The researcher searches for the answer about the fact and this paves the way for the truth in which the researcher questions the whole history of the world, whether all the world or history is a unique imagistic dream or not.

IV.Definition of Key Terms

Anarchy: Mathew Arnold sees it as a threat to the whole fabric of English society, a working class ‘asserts an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes’ (1869, 1971: 105). Anarchy leads to activities and past times that in their brashness and thoughtless vulgarity are the antithesis of culture (Bertens, Literary Theory, pp. 171, 172).

Discipline: The methods make possible “the meticulous control of the operation of the elements of the work, which assure the constant subjection of their forces and impose upon it a relation of docility-utility” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 137).

Discourse: is a system of statements within which and by which the world can be known, which is referring to ‘speech’. Foucault’s notion of discourse is an area of social knowledge. The world is not simply ‘there’ to be talked about rather it is discourse itself within which the world comes into being. It is the complex of signs and practices that organizes social existence and social reproduction which determines how experiences and identities are categorized (Ashcroft, Ahluwalia. Edward Said, 14).

Discursive Formation: In his The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) Foucault tells us a discourse is ‘a series of sentences and propositions’ and that it ‘can be defined as a large group of statements that belong to a single system of formation’ — a so-called discursive formation.

History and the Philosophy of History: Underlying Professor Wellington’s methodology (the old historicism) is a view of history declares history is an accurate view of what really occurred. This assumes historians are able to write “objectively about any given historical time period” and are able to state “the truth” about that era. New-historicism says all history is subjective, written by people whose personal biases affect their interpretation of the past. New-historicism never provides us with the “truth” or gives us a totally accurate picture of past events or the worldview of a group of people (Bressler, Theory and Practice, 128).

Historical Revisionism: Barnes’s work “resorts to a form of historical revisionism of his own using falsified evidence to not only embrace relativism but also to submit to the meta-narratives of those who are all too willing to falsify history in interests of power” (Theory and Practice, 180).

Historio-graphy: consists of the elements of real historical search and production. The writing of history has been founded on “a critical analysis of reliable source materials” and compound of the materials “into a narrative subject” to masterful models of criticism. The history-writing, established on the critical test of resources and the composition of selected specifications from those resources into a narrative will sustain the examination of critical designs (Maghan, Race and the Writing of History).

Linear: refers to “a definite beginning, a middle, and an end”. A philosophy of life or one’s worldview is considered linear (Bressler, Theory and Practice, pp. 131, 182).

Meta-fiction: Robert Scholes has popularized meta-fiction for the growing class of novels which depart from ‘realism’ and foreground the roles of the author in inventing the ‘fiction’ and of the reader in receiving the fiction (Scholes, Fabulation and Meta-fiction, (1979)).

Objective: An objective work is one in which the author presents the invented situation or the fictional characters and their thoughts, feelings, and actions and undertakes to remain detached and non-committal (Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, (1953), pp. 235-44).

Power: Foucault says power is located in strategies operate at every level: “they can not be reduced to the power of the state or a ruling class”, it is “productive of knowledge”, being “disseminated” throughout the whole of society. “It is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes everywhere” (History of Sexuality, pp. 93-99).

Subjective: A subjective work is one in which the author incorporates personal experiences, or rejects into the narrative his or her personal disposition, judgments, values, and feelings (Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, (1953), pp. 235-44).

V.Delimitations

These two novels are studied right exactly from the Historio-graphic Meta-fictional landscape; because the extension of the approach is predestined in the historio-graphic meta-fictional compass in which the researcher may have the manoeuvre to give comments of such a kind of viewpoint. With due attention to certain limitations which are inherent in the study, the researcher does not have much time, sufficient place, and possible necessity to investigate and extend beyond this subject matter. The most one who has talked about the historio-graphic meta-fictional viewpoint is Linda Hutcheon who is the master of parody and inter-textuality of history in post-modernism. She believes in what people name post-modernism in literature is categorized by self-reflexivity and parodic inter-textuality; she adds self-consciousness of history to the precision and consistency of historio-graphic-meta-fiction. There is the presence of the past which is used in fiction to describe the historical and the meta-fictional texts and contexts of the past. Her famous books disabuse the readers of the historio-graphic meta-fictional approach such as: 1. Pioneer or Invader? 2. The Writer Within Did It. 3. Los Misterios de Madrid. 4. O’Donnel and Con Davis 5. A Theory of Adaptation 6. A Canadian Post-modern: A Study of Contemporary English Canadian 7. The Politics of Post-modernism 8. A Poetics of Post-modernism: history, theory, and fiction 9. Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies 10. Bodily Charm: Living Opera 11. Opera: Desire, Disease, and Death.

The researcher confronts the most important critics and their opinions in the middle of the work such as: Edward Said’s and Jorge Luis Borges’s ideas that they show the assaults on modernist formalist closure by literary and philosophical theory, post-modern American fiction has appeared in history, that Edward Said names the “world.” But, it is stated that the certainty of historical novels has been disappeared and it can not function safely anymore. On the other hand, the thesis also refers to Borges’s speech that Jorge Luis Borges claims both Literature and the World are fictive realities because the certainty of self-reference and subjective level is gone too. New-Historical Philosophy also shows the most common section for human activities and behaviors is power; therefore, the new-historicists find samples of power and how it is correctly distributed throughout the text. Power directly indicates the most powerful people always write the literature in order to show the attitudes of the common people. New-Historicists struggle with/for the most powerful group by who this group or entity is finally identified. Foucault exactly understands and perceives power and knowledge articulate on each other. As a matter of fact, in the 1970s his work on prisons has been more influential on the New-Historicism. He tested and experimented changes in the process and procedure of power in the fundamental settings. His debates of techniques applied to a critical surveillance system and method developed by Jeremy Bentham who is the great British critic.

VI.Method, Design and Approach

The thesis investigates the two novels The Porcupine and Arthur & George by Julian Barnes in their relevant model and approach. But first, it elaborates the historiography, the meta-fiction, the new-historicism, the historio-graphic meta-fiction, then, Hutcheon’s insight of the historio-graphic meta-fiction, the novels by this approach, the author’s opinion, and the finale, models, designs, and methods by degrees.

The concept of historiography is as the accumulation and hoard of records and the concept of history is as storytelling, filled up explanations of cause and effect; but, the term meta-fiction refers to the growing novels which depart reality and foreground the roles of the writer in creating the fiction. On the other hand, New-Historicism is a school of literary theory that developed in the 1980s, basically through the work of critic Stephen Greenblatt. New-Historicists aim to get the work right through its main historical context and to perceive intellectual and cultural history through literature, that registers the new order, while Historio-graphic Meta-fiction investigates the presence of the past. It challenges historical fiction, real objective history, and textuality. To parody enshrines the past and to question it, so this is the post-modern paradox. Also, Hutcheon’s insight of historio-graphic meta-fiction can be deduced that historio-graphic meta-fiction works to put itself in historical discourse without giving up its autonomy as fiction. Hutcheon’s use of the term “repetition” in her description, is implied that, parody, as its core, involves imitation. The literary works by Hutcheon should be brought as the historio-graphic meta-fictional literary works in the new-historical bed. They include Pioneer or Invader?, The Writer Within Did It., Los Misterios de Madrid., O’Donnel and Con Davis, A Theory of Adaptation, A Canadian Post-modern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian, The Politics of Post-modernism, A Poetics of Post-modernism: history, theory, and fiction, Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies, Bodily Charm: Living Opera, and Opera: Desire, Disease, and Death.

Barnes says the confusion of individuals deprived of framing certainties, his characters in these two novels look to history for answers and find questions about them. Barnes believes these two novels can be designated as the supreme literary works in which the researcher acknowledges deep knowledge has been well built in the historio-graphic meta-fictional insight.

Respecting method, design or model of the historio-graphic meta-fictional approach, the researcher has used some physical handbooks, library books, e-books, essays, articles, and on-line journals which are useful to be discussed clearly as brief as possible, the researcher indicates the method of the work via studying those books and essays mentioned above along which some of critics and theorists explain their common opinions. The books are: 1. Meta-fiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction by Patricia Waugh, 2. The Art of Novel by David Lodge, 3. Meta-physics to Meta-fictions: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the End of Philosophy SUNY Series in Hegelian Studies by Paul S. Miklowitz, and the essays, articles, and journals are: 1. Narrative, Literacy, and Quest for the Self by Rishma Dunlop, 2. The Parodic Historical Novel: Critiquing the Representation of Past Events by J. K. Gibson, 3. Historio-graphic Meta-fiction: Self-reflexive, Parody, Inter-textuality by L. Hutcheon, 4. Game, Reality, and Historiography in John Barth’s: The Sot-Weed Factor by Dr. Pi-hua Ni, 5. Historicist Inquiry in The New-Historicism and British Historio-graphic Meta-fiction by Doc. Dr. Serpil Oppermann. Therefore, the common ideas of the post-modern critics and theorists in the historio-graphic meta-fictional reach to which the thesis has referred include the recent historical and critical inquiries into parody they suggest that the parodic historical novel not only mocks historio-graphic forms but also poses a serious critique of these forms and their ability to represent the past.

VII.Review of Literature

There are three thinkers who have studied “Historio-graphic Meta-fiction” include Gurria-Quintana Angel, Hunter-Tilney Ludovic, and Francis Maier. This thesis will be almost deduced as an original and post-modern work, because these two novels have been less studied and known from historio-graphic meta-fictional approach; so, this is an up-to-date work on which the researcher has worked since 1 Jan. 2009 to 30 Oct. 2010. The researcher’s major source for both general and special classified information on philosophy is by order, A History of Literary Criticism from Plato to the Present by M. A. R. Habib, and Dissertations, Theses, Databases, and Articles of JSTOR and ProQuest sites/nets which provide clear scholarly details on different philosophers and their works. The researcher refers to these three critics who have given their comments on the two novels; actually, the researcher shows their findings and believes they have just used their literary critical theories in the form of dissertation/thesis as their framework, so has the researcher. But the researcher’s comments are quite different from these three critics in some fields of approaching, so that; there is no similarity between the researcher’s comments and these all three theses.

According to Gurria-Quintana Angel in her dissertation Remaking history Painstaking detective work weighs down a tale of Arthur Conan Doyle’s role in a real life case believes Arthur wants to save his friend George from his conviction in order to revive George’s good fame, though they are not endearing. Angel believes people sympathize George’s destiny while they do not perceive Arthur’s situation and disposition. On the other hand, the female characters are out of sights and do not support their protagonists; so, the protagonists remain alone.

The researcher can not agree with Angel’s idea; as the readers know Arthur and George have been two close friends for a long time but their destiny intersects them and they again encounter each other to see their situation and position that is, Arthur helps George to clear his infamous background, thus, they endear each other and take tender care of themselves, because Arthur is not forced to help him, that is to say, he himself is interested in promoting and helping George’s case on the one hand and he returns to his life by the new motivation on behalf of his new beloved whose hot support makes him live his life on the other hand. Arthur as the hero of the novel is supported by his beloved whose platonic relationship makes their life be set on its feet, because this woman can change Arthur’s and George’s lives as another central characteristic in the novel; thus, faithful and devoted women always affect protagonists in order to advance their lives and always act as the centralized characteristics to sustain and support their heroes. In the end, the readers can easily understand Arthur’s and George’s situations and dispositions, because Arthur as a professional detective can afford all of things against George in the British system of judgment, because the researcher believes Arthur exonerates George in order not to cause his identity and hybridity become his guilts of getting in jail, as some cases in British system of judgment can easily make case frame-up by juggle to pass a judgment.

According to Hunter-Tilney Ludovic in his dissertation Man of Mystery Sherlock Holmes maintains Julian Barnes gives the life and dexterities to Arthur that bigoted Sherlockians do not accept, because they believe such a kind of man can be literary. Doyle acts like a professional detective who has a real entity and he uses his imagination and creation to discover the fact and manage the criminals. Holmes’s stories are successful in which the readers study people like a book which are led by an unreadable grand detective.

The researcher may not accept Ludovic’s idea about Doyle’s career, because this story is based on reality and all of the events, characters, and settings has actually happened; the real novelist detective Doyle can investigate the complicated law court cases through which he has experienced different situations. This new experienced detective Arthur or Sherlock or someone like him has been discovering truths and testing every criminal case every day when those professional detectives may not have been experiencing those cases; because by passage of time, there will be new happenings, crimes, and civil procedures in which the smart detective Arthur has to defeat the problems and solve the riddles, therefore; the fanatical Sherlockians have to accept him and they can not be displeased of this issue. Certainly every era has seen the different detectives with different incidents who could conquer the law-suits, crimes and trial cases. Every turn has had better and more powerful detective than preceding era. Consequently, Arthur as an experienced detective has his own real entity with his real position and real problems concerned with George’s criminal case; in other words, by using his own creative skills and different experiences he really could save his friend’s life from danger, as the researcher says, it has really occurred; thus, the readers have studied Holmes’s stories, so have Doyle’s story. Both are readable as the researcher has done this; they are not far away from reality, because they are of people’s daily lives.

Francis Maier in the thesis A Political Shooter as the researcher says, acknowledges the communist dictator Petkanov is tried by the government and rival Solinsky manages to bring three indictments such as: false documents, mismanagement, and misuse of authority to make him depose and finally Petkanov confesses his guilts while the foreign men of fortune have other plots. But, Petkanov never loses his temper and starts to play with Solinsky, court and media to defeat them. The more Solinsky makes his effort to discover Petkanov’s characteristic, the less he understands and knows him. Because Petkanov as a smart person, knows Solinsky’s vanity, lack of morality, and marital infidelity better than himself. Thus, Petkanov uses these all to humiliate Solinsky, because he has discovered Solinsky’s plans during which he would definitely win the case.

The researcher contemplates beyond Maier’s comments to manifest the real events in the world of politics which is combined with lie and imagination. The researcher knows Solinsky counterfeits a series of indictments based on pure lie; in fact, this can be the beginning of political dissipation of communist dictatorship in which Petkanov is surely made to resign the governorship; it is of course, the political plan of ousted tyrants, because Solinsky is set under the pretext of making peace and adjusting justice that can play his role as valve; besides, these events cause such kinds of quarrel between the accused and lawgiver and even launching the civil war. Solinsky may be a kind of satellite or functionary on the side of the powerful foreigners by who he takes control democratically after forty years which can be just for show to people while there is another truth beyond this proceeding in which people are unaware of it because there is no sympathy for citizens on the side of their leaders who profit by their supportive authorities who can easily depose the ex-leader of dictatorship. It should be said that a democratic party must establish its rules and here is the question whether or not this liberalism or democracy presents freedom and respect for people; also, whether or not this policy can treat and correspond with people’s demanding and whether or not it is named as a real democratic system.

The researcher’s dissertation aims at finding an answer to the question why and how Julian Barnes like his colleagues and his contemporary generation is involved in transformation of historical novels in post-modern literature which culminate in parodic historical novels which self-consciously may have bad effect on the historical literary works. It is important to note whether Julian Barnes will be specified as a historical writer and his meta-fictional opinions contain parodied models through the process of imitations or not. And finally, the study’s major source for the definition of some important literary terms and expressions is Jeremy Hawthorn’s A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory, M. H. Abrams’s and G. G. Harpham’s A Glossary of Literary Terms, and Bill Ashcroft’s and Pal Ahluwalia’s Edward Said which provide a general definition of literary terms whenever a definition was/is needed.

VIII.Tentative Outline

I.Introduction

A.General Overview

B.Statement of the Problem

C.Significance of the Study

D.Definition of Key Terms

E.Delimitations

F.Method, Design, and Approach

G.Review of Literature

H.Tentative Outline

II.Historio-graphic Meta-fictional Theory

A.Self-reflexivity

B.Parody and Inter-textuality of History

1.Linda Hutcheon

C.Historio-graphy

1.The Greek Historians

D.Meta-fiction

1.Robert Sholes

E.New-Historicism

1.Stephen Greenblatt

2.Michel Foucault

III.Analysis of the Novel The Porcupine

A.The Concept of Discipline of the History through Numerous Narrative Genres

1.A Series of Digressions and Fragmentations

B.Historio-graphic Meta-fiction

1.The Presence of the Past

2.Self-Conscious Dimension of History

C.Real History and Where Truth Begins and Ends:

1.Objective Knowledge

2.Inevitable Subjectivity

D.Narrators and Characters: Does Any Body See the Truth?

1.Dialogues: Negotiating the Truth

IV.Analysis of the Novel Arthur & George

A.Real and Imaginary Beginnings and Endings

B.Inter-textuality: Multiple Truths Under Construction

1.Guilt is against of Innocence: One Person’s Reality Is Another Person’s Untruth

2.Real or Fictional Characters … or Both?

3.Making Up True Stories According to Other People’s Stories

4.The Uncertainty of Love

V.Conclusion

A.Summing Up

B.Findings

C.Suggestions for Further Researches or Readings