SOURCE: Mazurek, Raymond A. “Metafiction, the Historical Novel, and Coover's The Public Burning.” Critique 23, no. 3 (spring 1982): 29-42.

In the following essay, Mazurek views Robert Coover's The Public Burning as a metafictional historical novel.

Robert Coover's The Public Burning (1977), a fictionalized account of the Rosenberg case told largely from the point of view of Richard Nixon, combines metafictional techniques with a critique of American history and ideology. Among the many recent examples of serious historical fiction, Coover's novel seems unusual in the extent of its satire and the bitterness of its vision. As the often perplexed and sometimes hostile response of readers and critics indicates, The Public Burning is an “explosive object.”¹ Whatever our difficulties in responding to Coover's text, it is well worth examining, for it reveals the problems confronted by a new kind of historical novel that has emerged in recent years.

The “major novels of the...