Regional redemption: Graham Swift's 'Waterland' and the end of history

The essay suggests a Scottish approach to Graham Swift's 1983 novel Waterland. Using the Scottish critic Cairns Craig's Out of History paradigm as my theoretical basis, I argue that Swift's protagonist, the historian Tom Crick, is compelled to abandon his subject because traditional history has failed to answer his need for explanations. To compensate for this, Crick adopts an English regionalist discourse. Through his emphasis on Fenland geology, landscape and tradition, Crick overcomes the breakdown of history, exchanging a conventional, centralist perspective for an alternative, peripheral vision.