Toni Morrison’s Home: Political Agency/Non-Agency in Historiographic Metafiction

This paper seeks to categorize Toni Morrison’s Home as a historiographic metafictional novel, and to investigate its politics as the dominant narrative form of postmodernist fiction. As assumed by critics, narrative is the central process of human mind that carries within itself multiple ideological dimensions, and in this regard historiographic metafiction is no exception. Linda Hutcheon considers historiographic metafiction as a combination of the literary and the historic, in which the examination of power relations is a major theme; therefore, such a narrative form is nothing but political. This research is an attempt to analyze the way the political is reflected through such narrative apparatuses as representation, parody, self-reflexivity, paratext, and so forth. Given this, the researchers investigate whether historiographic metafiction is politically agent or non-agent.