The present study aims to investigate major historiographical negotiations in Pat Barker’s selected novels of Life Class (2007) and Noonday (2015) concerning theoretical premises of ‘history as narrative’ and ‘emplotment’. Life Class, as the first novel from Barker’s trilogy under the same name, takes into account the significant incidences prior to and during the outbreak of the First World War. The subsequent novel, Noonday, as the last novel of the historical trilogy under consideration, includes a detailed description of the closing years of the Second World War. Novelist’s employment of literary and aesthetic techniques, alongside her imagination in mingling the factual and the fictional, play an exceedingly momentous role in the selected works. The principal proposition of postmodern aesthetic historiography is that in textualizing history artistic criteria are principally concerned. Within this procedure, the realities of history are prefigured in the mind of the historian and subsequently institutionalized in a poetic context. Hayden White’s two major premises of history as narrative and historical emplotment primarily function as the essential instruments in the process of encodation of structure and meaning. Ultimately, it is concluded that in the narrative representation of the two World Wars in the context of the novels under investigation, the aesthetic historiographical conventions are employed with a particular emphasis on rhetorical techniques.
