In spite of the lagging theoretical interest in historical fiction, the literary production
of historical novels continues to be extremely rich among younger representatives
of Austrian literature. Till Eulenspiegel by Clemens J. Setz, Das lange Echo by Elena
Messner, and rotten by Lydia Haider att est to an ambiguous relation not only to the
poetics of postmodern historiographic metafiction (per Linda Hutcheon) but also to
its critical reinterpretations. This article analyzes the core features of these works—the
self-reflective meta-level of paratexts, the language shaped by deconstructivist impulses,
and the skepticism toward historical knowledge—in order to demonstrate to what extent
the selected works apply an innovative approach to generic traditions and to what
extent they prefer certain canonized forms of historical narrative. Even though a
strong claim is made for the revision of the canon in terms of youth literature (Setz),
of the elite literary canon (Messner), and the cultural memory of the Holocaust (Haider),
the three examples solve these questions in differing ways.
