TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2017//
TI  - Historical restoration, narrative agency, and silence in Graham Swift's waterland
JO  - Journal of Modern Literature
A1  - Meneses, J.
SP  - 135
EP  - 152
VL  - 40
IS  - 3
N2  - Losing his job as a history teacher causes the narrator and protagonist of Graham Swift's Waterland (1983) to reflect on the past and chronicle the death of a local boy during his teenage years. In doing so, Tom Crick also offers what seems to be a redeeming account of his paternal family's role in the Fens, the land dominated over the centuries by his maternal ancestors, the Atkinsons. In telling their story, however, he exercises the same exclusion that once relegated the Cricks to the historical periphery. Self-appointed family chronicler, Crick imposes narrative representation as the only way to exert one's historical agency. Yet his half-brother Dick's suicide, which emerges as an impenetrable silence, brings the account to an abrupt end, revealing the representational inadequacy of Crick's project of historical restoration while, ironically, inaugurating a new horizon of possibility for the narrator's life. Copyright © The Trustees of Indiana University.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 0022-281X
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.40.3.10
ID  - ref1
ER  -