WRITING HISTORY AS A PROPHET -- Editorial page -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Table of contents -- Preface -- I. Postmodernism and History -- A Revival of Historical Fiction -- The Corpus of Postmodernist Historical Fiction -- The Delineation of Postmodernism -- Postmodernism and Deconstruction -- Linda Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism -- The Postmodern and the Utopian -- Notes -- II. Some Theoretical Deliberations About Genre -- Genre as a Social Institution -- Notes -- III. The Classical Model of Historical Fiction -- The Emergence of the Historical Novel -- The Framing of the Waverley Novels -- The Didactic Function of the Historical Novel -- Imitation and Emulation -- The Demise of Scott -- Notes -- IV. Modernist Experiments With the Historical Novel -- A Twentieth-Century Perspective on Scott's Shallowness -- Historicism Criticized -- Historical Fiction and the Questioning of Objective Historical Knowledge -- Modernist Innovations of the Historical Novel -- The Subjectivization of History -- The Transcendence of History -- Sef-Reflexivity -- Historical Fiction and the Detective Novel -- Notes -- V. Fiction Historical and Scientific -- Science Fiction and the Utopian Mode -- Utopian Historical Fiction and Nostalgic Science Fiction -- Time-Travelling -- Uchronian Fiction -- The Parodic Nature of Counterfactual Conjecture -- The Political Implications of Uchronian Fiction -- Modernist Self-Reflexivity Versus Postmodernist Counterfactual Parody -- Notes -- VI. Self-Reflexivity in Postmodernist Historical Fiction -- The Conventionalization of Self-Reflexivity -- Historiography in the Making -- The Partiality of Historical Knowledge -- The Unreliability of the Sources -- Selectivity -- Narrativity -- Enclaves of Authenticity -- History in the Making -- Esthetic History -- Political History -- Toward Counterfactual Conjecture -- Notes.

VII. Alternate Histories -- Eclecticism -- Negational Counterfactual Conjecture -- Uchronian Fantasies -- History Turned Upside Down -- Counterfactual Shifts -- Closure -- Parody -- Coda: "Gravity's Rainbow -- Notes -- Conclusion -- References -- INDEX.