From the Effective to the Affective: Postmemory in Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter

Abstract

This article has a dual focus. It demonstrates the recent repoliticization of Linda Hutcheon’s category of historiographic metafiction through the extension of Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory to lesbian novelists, arguing that this theoretical framework offers a lens through which we can understand some recent trends in lesbian historical fiction. Focusing on the novelist and critic Emma Donoghue’s 2008 novel The Sealed Letter, it also argues that this text’s evocation of an imagined lesbian past, and its use of metafictional techniques, are illuminated by reading it as a highly political engagement with lesbian postmemory.