Fiction, Memory, and the Limits of the Medieval Archive: A New Historicist Reading of Julian Rathbone’s The Last English King
International Studies in the Field of World Languages and Literatures-I, Dr. Öğr. Üyesi Sudan Altun, Editör, Eğitim Kitabevi, Ankara, ss.103-118, 2026
- Yayın Türü: Kitapta Bölüm / Araştırma Kitabı
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Yayınevi: Eğitim Kitabevi
- Basıldığı Şehir: Ankara
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.103-118
- Editörler: Dr. Öğr. Üyesi Sudan Altun, Editör
- İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
This paper offers a New Historicist reading of Julian Rathbone’s The Last English King, arguing that the novel operates not as a counter-historical narrative but as a structural critique of the mechanisms by which the Norman archive was produced and the Anglo-Saxon record suppressed. Reading the novel alongside its primary historical interlocutors, Gesta Guillelmi, Bayeux Tapestry, and Domesday Book, the paper draws on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s account of the four moments at which silences enter historical production to demonstrate that the Norman record constitutes not merely a biased account but one systematically constituted by the suppression of the defeated culture. The paper then traces four formal strategies through which Rathbone constructs a counter-archival practice in response. First, the frame narrative politicises the act of historical transmission and makes visible the conditions of production that the chronicle tradition conceals. Second, the grounding of Walt’s authority in embodied, sensory witness inverts the chronicle’s hierarchy of credibility, which is based on institutional position rather than presence. Third, Walt’s productive unreliability, including his self-corrections and acknowledged gaps, is read not as a weakness but as an epistemologically honest exposure of the false omniscience that the chronicle performs. Fourth, the restoration of Harold Godwinson’s interiority, most concentrated in the moments before his death at Hastings, recovers the category of inner experience that the archive declared inadmissible. The paper concludes by situating the novel within its 1997 moment of production, arguing that its construction of a pre-Conquest English identity speaks directly to the post-imperial identity anxieties of that year, and that this historical situatedness confirms rather than undermines its critical force.