--- layout: post status: publish published: true title: ! 'Publication: “You will see the logic of the design of thisâ€: From Historiography to Taxonomography in the Contemporary Metafiction of Sarah Waters’s Affinity' wordpress_id: 2835 wordpress_url: https://www.martineve.com/?p=2835 date: !binary |- MjAxMy0wOC0zMCAxNzowNjoyNyArMDIwMA== date_gmt: !binary |- MjAxMy0wOC0zMCAxNjowNjoyNyArMDIwMA== categories: - Literature - Academia - Publications - Output tags: - Sarah Waters - Affinity - Taxonomography comments: [] --- <p>Although, in some ways, Sarah Waters’s <i>Affinity</i> looks akin to historiographic metafiction, M.-L. Kohlke has persuasively argued that the text is more accurately dubbed “new(meta)realismâ€, 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.</p> <p>Published in <i>Neo-Victorian Studies</i>. Open Access. CC-BY-NC-ND.</p> <p>Martin Paul Eve, <a href="http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/issues/NVS%206-1-5%20M-Eve.pdf">“You will see the logic of the design of thisâ€: From Historiography to Taxonomography in the Contemporary Metafiction of Sarah Waters’s <i>Affinity</i></a>, <i>Neo-Victorian Studies</i>, 6:1 (August 2013), pp. 105-125.</p>