What does morality have to do with history? Should the past be pluralised as a heuristic category? Might we disengage common representational tropes from historical events otherwise remembered in ...mutually contradictory ways? This study attempts to answer these questions by narrowing in on the contested legacy of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (1750-1799). Tipu is remembered today both as a proto-anticolonial figure who died fighting the East India Company (EIC), and a Muslim tyrant who colonised a mostly Hindu southern India. This martyr/monster duality finds expression in contending portrayals of his death in combat against the British in 1799. Tipu's 'last stand' becomes the pivot of this discussion where I will demonstrate how the past is used to envision moral victory from conflict by its presenters in comparable events like the Battle of Pollilur (1780) and the Battle of Alamo (1836). This means, I contend, that the past being exploited for various ends is split from itself at the moment of its enunciation; replicated and reproduced in accordance with the ideological exigencies of its presenters. I will argue that this calls for a paradigmatic shift from the Rankean ideal of what really happened to how what supposedly happened is told; who tells it; and for what purpose. Through this proposed model, I will elaborate how the historical 'fact' becomes 'meaningful', and how morals and history, history and fiction, colonial and anticolonial, are closer to each other than apart.
Historical fiction has gained a degree of popularity among readers in the last two decades it has not enjoyed since the fashion for writing novels about national history was set by Sir Walter Scott ...in the early 19th century. Later in that same century, however, the value of historical fiction as such was challenged by historians who were eager to make history a science, they claimed that academic historical writing provided an objective view of the past based on archival research and was therefore fundamentally superior to historical novels. A devaluation of historical fiction took place which is still felt today. In the context of this opposition of history and fiction, Emma Donoghue's recent historical fiction offers a fresh approach to the genre. The aim of this article, after reviewing the issue of its relationship to history, is to analyze Donoghue's innovative combination of fiction and the archive in two collections of short historical fiction, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) and Astray (2012). Donoghue's own reflections on her work are applied in this analysis, as well as the theoretical approach to this kind of fiction by Lubomir Dolezel.
RESUMO O texto analisa a relação entre história e ficção na obra do escritor uruguaio Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994) a partir de dois temas que são recorrentes em sua obra: o passado e o exílio. Para ...tanto, recorre a dois contos, distantes quase vinte anos um do outro: “La cara de la desgracia”, publicado originalmente em 1960, e “Presencia”, de 1978. Em “La cara de la desgracia”, as lembranças atormentam o narrador, que entrevê, num encontro casual com uma garota, a possibilidade de reconstruir a própria memória e libertar-se do peso e da possessão do passado. Em “Presencia”, conto de forte conotação política, escrito durante o exílio de Onetti, o protagonista, também exilado, reinventa a realidade, por meio de uma falsa investigação, para “compensar a perda desorientadora, criando um mundo novo para governar” (Edward Said). Nos dois casos, desponta a figura de um escritor “impertinente”, estranho à tradição do chamado boom literário latino-americano dos anos 1960 e capaz de problematizar as fronteiras entre história e ficção.
Historical fiction has gained a degree of popularity among readers in the last two decades it has not enjoyed since the fashion for writing novels about national history was set by Sir Walter Scott ...in the early 19th century. Later in that same century, however, the value of historical fiction as such was challenged by historians who were eager to make history a science; they claimed that academic historical writing provided an objective view of the past based on archival research and was therefore fundamentally superior to historical novels. A devaluation of historical fiction took place which is still felt today. In the context of this opposition of history and fiction, Emma Donoghue’s recent historical fiction offers a fresh approach to the genre. The aim of this article, after reviewing the issue of its relationship to history, is to analyze Donoghue’s innovative combination of fiction and the archive in two collections of short historical fiction, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002) and Astray (2012). Donoghue’s own reflections on her work are applied in this analysis, as well as the theoretical approach to this kind of fiction by Lubomir Doležel.
Este volumen es un intento de renovación y desperiferialización de los estudios ibéricos, enfocando lo periférico como posicionamiento geográfico, cultural e ideológico, a la hora de cuestionar la ...óptica hegemónica del centro y revisar los cánones culturales preexistentes, y sus vacíos, exclusiones e invisibilidades. Se trata de una múltiple tarea – realizada desde Australia y Nueva Zelanda – que incluye el estudio de formas culturales periféricas, tanto de las llamadas nacionalidades históricas ausentes del canon cultural/literario/lingüístico castellano, como de otros grupos minorizados que han sido tradicionalmente desplazados a diferentes tipos de periferia, tales como los exiliados, los presos políticos, los inmigrantes, los gitanos, las clases trabajadoras, los sujetos coloniales o las minorías sexuales, en un contexto global.
The aim of this essay is to compare two novels which could be, due to their thematic and ideology, considered postcolonial: a novel by António Lobo Antunes (Comissão das Lágrimas, 2011) and a novel ...by José Eduardo Agualusa (Estação das Chuvas, 1995). The two novels focus on the Angolan post-independence period, pointing out the problems of power and identity. Based on a relation between history and fiction (H. White, L. Doležel etc.), our text pretends to show how the literary representation reflects, in a dystopic view, emotional stress and trauma which could not be expressed in a supposedly objective and factual discourse.
Geschiedenis, verhalen en narratieve constructie van realiteit in Graham Swifts Waterland.
Na een korte inleiding over historiografische metafictie, wordt in dit artikel besproken hoe Waterland (net ...als andere werken in deze categorie) het probleem thematiseert van de historiografie als narratieve constructie van het verleden, geleid door bepaalde regels en conventies. Waterland toont hoe dun de grens tussen geschiedenis en verhalen kan worden, zonder daarom mee te gaan in de postmoderne verleiding om historiografie gelijk te stellen aan fictie, en met nadruk op het belang van geschiedenis voor ons bestaan. Het slot van de paper is toegespitst op het belang van verhalen in menselijke levens, en toont hoe de roman werkt met het idee dat mensen verhalen vertellen om zin te geven aan hun leven en aan de wereld rondom hen. Waar aangewezen wordt een vergelijking gemaakt met twee andere historische metafictiewerken, Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger en Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot, om te tonen dat het niveau van het heden de bovenhand neemt op het echte verhaal van het verleden in historiografische metafictie, en om de stelling te onderbouwen dat dergelijke romans niet proberen om de grens tussen factuele en fictionele vertelling uit te vegen wanneer de objectiviteit van de geschiedenis in vraag gesteld wordt.
Histoire, narration et construction narrative de la réalité dans Waterland de Graham Swift.
Après une courte introduction dédiée à la métafiction historiographique, cette étude analyse les manières dont Waterland, comme d’autres textes de la métafiction, thématise le problème de l’historiographie en tant que construction narrative du passé, guidée par certaines règles et conventions.
Waterland démontre à quel point la frontière entre histoire et histoires peut être mince, tout en résistant à la tentation postmoderne de mettre sur le même niveau historiographie et fiction et en insistant sur l’importance de l’histoire pour notre existence. La partie finale de la présente étude se concentre sur la signification de raconter des histoires dans la vie humaine et montre comment le roman fonctionne, avec l’idée que les gens racontent des histoires pour conférer du sens à leurs vies et au monde autour d’eux. Une comparaison aux deux autres ouvrages de métafiction historiographique, Moon Tiger de Penelope Liverly et Flaubert’s Parrot de Julian Barnes, est effectuée là où cela s’avère nécessaire, afin d’illustrer à quel point, dans les oeuvres de métafiction historiographique, le présent domine l’histoire du passé. Cela a pour but de soutenir la thèse de l’article selon laquelle, tout en questionnant l’objectivité de l’histoire, de tels romans ne visent pas à gommer complètement la frontière entre narration factuelle et fictionnelle.
After a short introduction dedicated to historiographic metafiction, this paper discusses the ways in which Waterland, like other works in this category, thematizes the problem of historiography as narrative construction of the past guided by certain rules and conventions. Waterland demonstrates how thin the boundary between history and stories can possibly become, while resisting the postmodern temptation of equating historiography with fiction and insisting on the importance of history for our existence. The final part of the paper concentrates on the significance of storytelling in human lives and shows how the novel works with the idea that people tell stories to make sense of their lives and the world around them. Comparisons to two other works of historiographic metafiction, Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger
and Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, will be made where appropriate to illustrate how the level of present dominates over the actual story of the past in historiographic metafiction and to support the paper’s claim that by questioning the objectivity of history such novels do not aim to erase the boundary between factual and fictional narration.
Fonioková Zuzana. History, Storytelling, and Narrative Construction of Reality in Graham Swift’s Waterland. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 95, fasc. 3, 2017. Langues et littératures modernes – Moderne Taal- en Letterkunde. pp. 561-574.
Cet article présente le dernier roman en date de Jean Echenoz : intitulé 14 et publié en 2012, il a pour cadre le conflit franco-allemand de 1914. Cette œuvre fictionnelle a tonalité historique est ...abordée selon un plan tripartite qui présente d'abord les modalités d'écriture d'un tel roman, qui souligne ensuite la pratique typiquement échenozienne de l'ironie et qui explicite enfin les défis relevés par ce roman contemporain saisi par l'Histoire.
Few branches of postcolonial literature are as contested as the historical fiction of settler societies. This interview with the Australian historical novelist Rohan Wilson, author of The Roving ...Party (2011) and To Name Those Lost (2014), explores the intersections between truth, accuracy, and existential authenticity in his fictional accounts of nineteenth-century Tasmania. Wilson offers a nuanced yet robust defence of fiction’s role in narrating colonial history. He explains his intentions in writing two linked yet distinctive novels of the frontier—one that focuses on the “Black War” of the 1820s and 1830s, and another that explores how racial violence is refracted by capitalism in subsequent decades.
In the Greek schools of the Roman Empire, the handbooks of rhetoric (Progymnasmata) defined ekphrasis as a speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes. These manuals also point to ...Thucydides as one of the best specialists in this rhetorical technique which consisted, essentially, to give vividness (enargeia) imagery to the speech as a way to engage the imagination and feelings of the reader. In this article we present a set of examples, taken from the History of the Peloponnesian War, which prove the skill of the Athenian historian to make us “see” the events in the mind's eye. After that and using the opinions of Paul Ricœur around history and fiction (from the normal and healthy coexistence between readability and visibility along with the ethic power of the textual image in situations that cry out applause or disapproval), we will see how this rhetorical and fictional strategy, used by Thucydides and recovered now by Ricoeur for the studio of contemporary historiography, can be reconciled with a discipline that aims at objectivity, impartiality and scientific rigor.
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