1The articles brought together in this section of n° 54 of Études britanniques contemporaines emanate from the workshop organised by SEAC (Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines) at the 2017 SAES conference (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur). The topic chosen for the conference was ‘(Re)constructions’, and it might seem surprising that the notion has not aroused greater critical interest, so pertinent it seems to our exploration of literary memory, intertextuality and cultural re-appropriation. Little remains to be said, or so it appears, about literature’s palimpsestuous workings, its dialectical relation to the past as well as its transcension of influence. In her essay ‘Remembering as Re-Inscription—With a Difference’, Catherine Belsey returns at length to the way our relation to all literary texts and cultural artefacts interweaves past, present and future in a vitally critical process of ‘re-inscription’. Taking the example of our intimate and distant link to Shakespeare’s language, she explains that ‘What enables us to “get into it” in the first place is very often the cultural memory of a pattern we already know—but played out with a difference’ (15). Her concluding remarks on the dialectical dynamics of cultural memory are worth quoting at length for the definition they offer of the visionary entanglement of invention and re-invention, writing and re-writing :

• 1 The volume in which Catherine Belsey’s piece was published is here of paramount interest as it focu (...)

Re-inscription represents a process of discovery. The new is constructed out of old materials to produce a text that modifies the possibilities for the future. In this respect, it surely constitutes one instance of cultural memory which puts on display the processes of remembering. Texts, like cultures, have a past. Intertextual memory does not simply recover this, as if it had been stored away in a trunk and could now be brought to light just as it was. Instead, as memory revitalizes previous texts, it brings the past into the present, and thus alters or expands the options for the future. Instead of displaying what was, cultural memory uncovers what will have been the case. By that means, it modifies both past and future. (15-16)1

2Literature is no passive material. Reading and interpretation do not merely delve into it as into a treasure trove. Reading the past implies a reappropriation that is also a utopian gesture addressing the future. The semantic caveat that brackets the prefix ‘re’ or places it between scare quotes is no mere word-play. Reconstructing a literary past, rewriting it intertextually is a complex process through which homage and subversion, interpretation and creative appropriation are always held in tension. That paradoxical a-teleological movement is, in a previous note of Belsey’s analysis, associated to Lacan’s definition of remembering, and one might thus also usefully reflect on the unconscious mechanisms of cultural memory : ‘What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming’ (Lacan 86, quoted in Belsey 4). The creativeness of culture, as well as its visionary work are inherent to this entanglement of past, present and future. Such dialectics may seem at odds with the overarching teleological narrative of aesthetic modernity and its vindication of the disruptive intensity of Modernism and the avant-gardes ; yet critics have also long shown how late modernists attempted to move beyond the disruptive visions of the modernists (Miller).

3Literature’s relation to history is of key value to understand the process by which literature both recovers the past and invents it: in other words (re)constructs it. As early as the 1970s both Paul Veyne and Michel de Certeau redefined the task of the historian in similar terms. The historian cannot hope to recover a distant past, yet history-writing is, according to de Certeau, less a matter of acknowledging the discontinuities opened between past and present, than of writing in the margings of knowledge (89-92). Paul Veyne had gone one step further already when he had insisted that ‘the first task of historians is not to treat a subject, but to invent it’ (196, my translation). Such reassessments of history-writing and of referentiality were to have a considerable impact on post-structuralist literary theory. Linda Hutcheon’s crafting of the category of ‘historiographic metafiction’ in A Poetics of Postmodernism, and its lasting influence, testify to the necessity to reinvent our understanding of historical representation and to acknowledge the discursiveness of our reconstruction of the past. Reconstructing the past necessarily implies (re)constructing it discursively, as she underlines in one of the most seminal moments of her essay : ‘Historiographic metafiction […] signal[s] the discursive nature of all reference—both literary and historiographical. […] Once again, this does not deny that the past “real” existed ; it only conditions our mode of knowledge of that past. We can know it only through its traces’ (119).

4The present collection of articles takes a specific interest in such questioning. The opening section—‘(Re)constructing the Past/Reading the Present’—specifically turns to the way modernist and contemporary British fiction has re-constructed certain key moments of the 20^th century. Joseph Conrad’s The Rover (1923) and Adam Thorpe’s Nineteen Twenty-One (2001) both confront the memory—whether near or distant—of World War One, while Samuel Beckett’s The Capital of the Ruins (1946) turns to the recently concluded World War Two. The haunting presence of the two World Wars is no mere spectre, or rather its very spectrality becomes a creative force that tests the very nature of literary imagination and its capacity to invent—both recover and produce—a past that is both reality and figment. More recent fiction on cultural displacement, such as Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore (2003), also foregrounds the necessity to explore the frontiers or margins of history, its gaps and silences.

5The paradoxical logic of literary invention is compounded by stylistic or intertextual experimentation, when it fictionalises the past in often playful and meta-aesthetic rewritings of the canon. Such experimentations are the subjects of the second section : ‘Textual/Cultural (Re)constructions’. Julian Barnes’ iconoclastic appropriation of the Old Testament in A History of the World in 10^1/2 Chapters, A.S. Byatt’s humourous take on Victorian literature and life-writing, or contemporary poetry’s neomedievalist inspiration all testify to the self-aware exploration of literary fabrication and linguistic fabulation ; all considerations that have featured prominently as well in studies on neo-Victorian Literature (Gutleben, Kohlke and Gutleben) and literary reprising (Letissier).

6As is shown in the third section of the issue—‘Remediating the Literary’—, the pluralisation of literature’s relation to history and reality complexifies the issue further. The intermedial dialogue of literature and photography in Jean Rhys’ Smile Please (1979), the mixture of oral testimony and performance in ‘verbatim theatre’, the trans-media adaptations of Dickensian motifs exemplify the hermeneutic potential of such generic eclecticism. The (Re)construction at work here highlights the workings of culture itself and the way modernity’s experimentation with different media has made the entanglement of media even more obvious. (Re)constructing a photograph, an experience, a cultural motif, through language, performance or yet more images lays bare such entanglement and lays bare the creative potentialities of such transfer. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s essay Remediation. Understanding New Media has explored such interconnectedness at length : ‘No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces’ (15). Such ubiquity, such transfers across media and texts are what culture is made of. (Re)constructing experience, memories, reality, the past in its very elusiveness, necessitates we read across texts and cultural forms, in those gaps, margins, folds of creation where the new is always already to be (re)invented.