"You will see the logic of the design of this": from historiography to taxonomography in the contemporary metafiction of Sarah Waters's Affinity

Eve, Martin Paul (2013) "You will see the logic of the design of this": from historiography to taxonomography in the contemporary metafiction of Sarah Waters's Affinity. Neo-Victorian Studies 6 (1), pp. 105-125. ISSN 1757-9481.

Abstract

Although, in some ways, Sarah Waters?s Affinity looks akin to historiographic metafiction, M.-L. Kohlke has persuasively argued that the text is more accurately dubbed ?new(meta)realism?, a mode that demonstrates the exhausted potential of the form. This article suggests that genre play and a meta-generic mode, dubbed taxonomography, might be a further helpful description for the mechanism through which Waters?s novel effects its twists and pre-empts the expectations of an academic discourse community. This reading exposes Waters's continuing preoccupation with the academy but also situates her writing within a broader spectrum of fiction that foregrounds genre as a central concern. Ultimately, this article asks whether Waters?s novel can, itself, be considered as a text that disciplines its own academic study in the way that it suggests that the academy has become, once more, blind to class.

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