Histories of Futures Past: Dystopian Fiction and the Historical Impulse

Abstract

This article traces the historical impulse in two intertextually connected dystopian texts – George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) – by reading the two novels in the context of the construction of historical narrative after the proclaimed ‘end of history’ in the twentieth century. It considers their representation of history within the framework of literary criticism of the historical novel (György Lukács), critical dystopias (Tom Moylan), and memory as an active, mediated engagement with the past (Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney). It looks, more specifically, at how the texts contrast personal experience and the meta-narrative contemplation of memory with institutionalized versions of history on different diegetic levels by juxtaposing the narrators’/focalizers’ view of history with that presented in the framework of pseudo-historical appendices that accompany and significantly modify the interpretations of both narratives.