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Jeanette Winterson Boating for Beginners

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Jeanette Winterson Boating for Beginners
According to David Lodge realistic literature is based on “ their obsession with form to neglect the content and the third person omniscient mode is more often used to assert or imply the existence of society or history, than of heaven and hell. Therefore, modernist fiction eschews the straight chronological ordering of realistic material and the use of reliable omniscient intrusive narrator”. In her novel, Jeanette Winterson uses a “method of multiple points of view” and her novel “tends towards a fluid and complex handling of time, involving much cross-reference backwards and forwards across the chronological span of the action”. We can reinforce this idea by quoting Linda Hutcheon, who says: “the postmodern artist was no longer the inarticulate, silent alienated creator figure of the Romantic but some theorists who showed they could write with sharp wit verbal play and anecdotal verve”. For Christopher Pressler,
Jeanette Winterson is often described as one of the most controversial yet innovative fiction writers. Postmodernist techniques , modernist tradition, metafiction and magical realism are, however, mere instruments that Winterson deftly combines with a strong political commitment aimed at subverting socio-cultural power structures and ultimately, at appropriating traditionally male-defined concepts for her lesbian politics. She self-consciously questioned the mechanisms by which narratives texts are produced and partaken of a clear penchant of fantasy, magical realism and the fabulous. In Boating for Beginners, she rewrites the Flood and Noah’s Ark. In her fiction, God has not created men, it is Noah that makes God “ by accident out of a piece of gateau and a giant electrical toaster”. Gloria a homodiegetic adolescent female narrator struggles to find her own identity in a word of distorted fictions that pass for unquestionable realities.
To analyse the demystification of the rewritten history of the Genesis it is interesting to answer this



Bibliography: ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA (Hardcover - Jan. 1, 1961) BURNS, Christy L EDMUND, J. Smith. Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction. London: Batsford, 1991. GALLIX, F., Genres et catégories du roman Britannique contemporain, Paris, Armand Calvi, 1998, p. 169-186. HAWTHORN, Jeremy. Cunning Passages: New Historicism, Cultural Materialism and Marxism in the Contemporary Literacy Debate. New York: Arnold, 1996. HOLTON, Robert. Jarring Witnesses: Modern Fiction and the Representation of History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998. HUTCHEON, Linda REGARD, Frederic. L’ecriture feminine en Angleterre. Paris: PUF, 2002. WILLIAMS-WANQUET, Eileen. Jeanette Winterson’s Boating for Beginners: Both New Baroque and Ethics. Etudes Britanniques contemporaines numéro 23, 2002. --------Towards Defining “Postrealism”, a Re-Writing of the Bible as “Parodic Satire”: Jeanette Winterson’s Boating for Beginners. Journal of Narrative Theory 36.3 (Fall 2006): 389-419. WHITE, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973. WINTERSON, Jeanette. Boating for Beginners (1985), Minerva, 1990.

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