Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Doctorow, E. L. - Derek Wright (essay date 1993)

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Derek Wright (essay date 1993)

SOURCE: "Ragtime Revisited: History and Fiction in Doctorow's Novel," in International Fiction Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1993, pp. 14-16.

[In the following essay, Wright considers Doctorow's narrative melding of historical fact and fiction in Ragtime and the themes that are developed in the novel.]

Perhaps the crucial difference between E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1976) and other, more thoroughgoing fictional reinventions of history such as Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (1966) or Rushdie's Shame (1983) is that the latter use history to say something about fiction—they display the endlessly fertile capacity of the novelistic imagination to compensate for the stubborn limitations, or paucity, of facts—while Doctorow uses fiction to say something about history. Specifically, Doctorow calls into question the whole business of historicity and the origination of historical "fact" from...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Wirt Williams (review date 25 September 1960)
   2. Gwendolyn Brooks (review date 10 July 1966)
   3. Stanley Kauffman (review date 5 June 1971)
   4. Joseph Catinella (review date 17 July 1971)
   5. Patrick Parrinder (review date 4 April 1985)
   6. Richard D. Beards (review date Summer 1985)
   7. Marvin J. LaHood (review date Winter 1987)
   8. Michelle M. Tokarczyk (essay date Fall 1987)
   9. John G. Parks (essay date Winter 1991)
   10. Derek Wright (essay date 1993)
   11. Stephen Matterson (essay date Winter 1993)
   12. Stephen Cooper (essay date May 1993)
   13. Ann V. Miller (essay date Summer 1993)
   14. Stephen Fender (review date 27 May 1994)
   15. John Whitworth (review date 28 May 1994)
   16. Jonathan Franzen (review date 19 June 1994)
   17. Simon Schama (review date 19 June 1994)
   18. Mark Shechner (review date 10 July 1994)
   19. Andrew Delbanco (review date 18 July 1994)
   20. William Hutchings (review date Winter 1995)
   21. E. L. Doctorow with Michelle M. Tokarczyk (interview date Winter 1995)
   22. Michael Wutz (review date Spring 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright