Postmodern Historical Novels

A translator faced with a historical novel "in the making". The Sister Bells by Lars Mytting Publishing novel trilogies has been a popular phenomenon on the Norwegian market during the last few years. Translation rights to many of them have been sold to different countries, where the translators are being faced with a challenge of working with a text which only constitutes the first prat of a larger story, not knowing how the plot and its details are going to be developed. This text aims at a reflection upon the translator's specific role in a network created around the process of bringing a trilogy "in the making" from one language to another. The case study concentrates upon the novels The Sister Bells and The Hekne Tapestry written by Lars Mytting (two parts of a planned trilogy), published in Norway respectively in 2018 and 2020. As a theoretical background, the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is going to be implemented. The goal of the theoretical part of this text is also to try and define the novels' genre, reflect upon the notion of "historical fantasy" and answer the question how working with this particular kind of text makes the translator's experience unique. The study concentrates upon the roles and strategies the translator takes upon themselves as an actor in this very specific network.

Historical fictions create stories about events and individuals that once existed. Anxiety around the truth of such fictions is common and ‘authenticity’ and ‘accuracy’ are familiar terms in such discourse. However, this language is often used interchangeably with both terms typically referencing a text’s perceived truthfulness. This article argues for a distinction between accuracy and authenticity in historical fictions, proposing definitions for both terms. Accuracy denotes the extent to which a text’s representation is consistent with available evidence. It is concerned with historical veracity and whether specific aspects of an historical fiction can be considered factual. Authenticity, however, refers to an impression of accuracy and the extent to which readers believe that a representation captures the past. Appraisals of authenticity are subjective and are shaped by the prior representations of the past that have been encountered by an individual reader. Such perceptions might be informed by historical research, yet they are not necessarily so. Authentic representations need not be accurate. Using textual analyses of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Peter Morgan’s The Crown, the article demonstrates how accuracy and authenticity allow for discussion of the complex relations between fiction, evidence, truth, and culture in our reading of historical fiction.

The story of Tyagaraja, growing up in the village of Thiruvaiyaru and becoming the greatest composer of South Indian music is interwoven with the stories of his brother Jalpesh, who is remembered traditionally as a troublemaker and trickster. While Tyagaraja follows his inspiration to find spiritual heights through creating mystical music, his brother gets into trouble time and again, disturbing the plans of his family, and his community, and incurring the wrath of rulers who try to reign and control their fates and the land. The story is both poignant and humorous.

D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel (1981) narrates the personal history of Lisa Erdman who is mercilessly murdered in the Babi Yar massacre in 1941. The aim of this paper is to analyze the ways D. M. Thomas uses history in The White Hotel and discusses the main concern of the novel regarding history and its presentation. In order to make such an analysis, this paper will make use of the arguments in the seminal work of Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988), in which she illustrates the properties of “historiographic metafiction” – a category encompassing the postmodern novel whose basic motivation is to question the paradigms of traditional historiography. The White Hotel offers an experimental handling of traditional historical representation by dealing with the Holocaust as an historical event. In line with Hutcheon’s argumentations, this study claims that through its metafictional qualities, The White Hotel deconstructs all the techniques and methods on which traditional historiography builds itself. The characteristics that The White Hotel embodies – viz., it blends reality and fiction, problematizes traditional notions of subjectivity, self-reflexively incorporates overtly different literary forms and styles, and employs an unconventional plot structure –contribute significantly to its status as an example of historiographic metafiction. The employment of these experimental techniques inevitably leads the reader to think about the functions of these techniques, the writing process of the novel, as well as the writing process of history in general.

This book marks the first in-depth examination of Pynchon's debut novel, which was immediately recognized as a breakthrough  masterpiece. The eight essays collected in the volume provide both scholars and avid readers with new and original insights into a too-often underestimated work that, probably even more than Gravity's Rainbow, established Pynchon as one of the great masters of twentieth-century American literature.

This book deliberately privileges a multidisciplinary and transnational approach, encompassing collaborations from a particularly international and diverse academic context. As such, this volume offers a multifaceted pattern of expanding investigation that tackles the novel's apparent chaotic but meticolously organized structure by rereading it in the light of recent US and European history and economics, as well as by exploring its many real and imagined locations. Not only are the essays brought together here revelatory of Pynchon's way of working, but they also tell us something about our own ways of approaching his fiction.

Dejiny v súčasných maďarských románoch is a monograph which has an exceptionally wide perspective, many layers, and is written in an especially concise style. Not only can the book be read successfully by the audience as a source of the significant results of contemporary Hungarian prose, but the investigative perspectives suggested by the author and the integrated relevant literature can also be successfully applied in the analysis of other postmodern novels focusing on history in Hungarian, Slovak or any other language. In addition, they can function as the basis of comparative works similar to Rudolf Chmel’s or some of Görözdi ’s earlier studies, since facing the past is a mighty challenge, especially today, when previously marginalized voices are finally gaining some space and letting us see history in a new light.

Traditionally, the historical novel aims at representing – or inventing – characters from the past, by recreating the historical reality in which they acted and lived. What happens, however, when reality itself becomes grotesque, banal, absurd, or embarrassing, resulting less credible than any fictitious representation? When every historical or documentary reconstruction is seen as unreliable, idiosyncratic, dubious, or suspect? This essay analyzes Robert Coover’s postmodernist historical novel, "The Public Burning" (1977), in the light of György Lukács’s classical definition of the genre;
taking its cue from theorizations by Umberto Eco, Hayden White, and Linda Hutcheon, the essay aims at understanding whether (and how) postmodernist works such as Coover’s are still to be considered “historical novels” in the traditional sense. Hopefully, such an analysis will shed new light on the complex relationship between history, narration, and fiction in the second half of the twentieth century.

Covering Images. Media Realism in Don DeLillo’s Underworld (thesis in Danish)

The work of Don DeLillo (b. 1936) can be read as a response to the contemporary me-dia culture. His reputation as such mainly stems from White Noise (1984), which also marks the beginning of DeLillo’s own fame as an author. Still, his most successful novel to this day is Underworld (1997). This international no. 1 bestseller received criti-cal praise as a historical novel because of its panoramic representation of America in the shadow of the Cold War.

In the novel, however, this historical overview is primarily established through an aesthetical integration of the media products that have defined the historical period. Throughout the novel, this particular media realism is created through a compound of fictitious and historical media products (e.g., radio recordings, film strips, TV shows and websites). They prove to structure Underworld just as fundamentally and imper-cebtibly as they define the American cultural perception.

In this context, Underworld presents itself as an epistemological counterform to the contemporary media culture it sets out to depict. DeLillo’s novel displays a com-prehensive awareness of the media that it absorbs into its narrative and style but in spite of this metafictive consciousness, Underworld is not able to overcome the paradox of criticizing the very media culture that the novel also turns out to reproduce.
This problem concerns the epistemology of media fiction in general and has consequently been widely discussed in recent years. Literary critics such as David Fos-ter Wallace, Tony Tanner and Joseph Tabbi express divergent attitudes towards the epistemology of DeLillo’s media fiction, and by comparing their views it becomes pos-sible to approach an answer to the inherent epistemological questions in Underworld.
As is the case with DeLillo, however, literary criticism tends to base its interpre-tation of the media fiction on a cultural dichotomy between literature and television. This polarity does not necessarily represent the mimesis of the media realism in Un-derworld. By adapting the viewpoint of media research, television can be understood as something other and more than a negative influence on viewers and literature itself.

By complementing the reductive views of literary criticism with a media sociological angle on television, it is eventually possible to approach a more adequate understanding of Underworld’s own combination of literature and media products. This interdisciplinary method re-establishes the epistemology of the novel’s media realism and is, conclusively, also in accordance with Underworld’s own insistence on being read as an inter-play between various cultural discourses.

This article discusses the historical novels Q (Blissett, 2000) and 54 (Wu, 2002) by group authors Luther Blissett and Wu Ming. At first glance Q demonstrates the ideological and narrative achievements of the 19th-century historical novel following theories of Lukács and White, yet in playing with the theme of (multiple) identity its authors point toward what will become postmodern parody of those achievements in 54. Whereas the overabundance of meaning caused by the multiple identity of narrators (and authors) introduces a problematic conception of historicity leading from Q to 54, it will be the lack of meaning altogether in the latter which ultimately illustrates the end of historicity (as suggested by Jameson and Vattimo). I focus on the figures of the narrator and the Hitchcockian McGuffin, who function as narrative devices forwarding the plot and who, I argue, ultimately serve in illustrating the trajectory of the Italian historical novel from its inception to today.

The paper is devoted to "The King of Two Sicilies" – a novel from 1970 by Andrzej Kuśniewicz. The novel is analyzed as an intertextual, historiographic metanovel, depicting the relations between a single subject, its memory, marked by distortions of transgenerational transmissions, and the historical events it is entangled in. Special attention has been given to those aspects of the novel which, as Paul Coates suggests, make its narrative structure similar to a movie’s structure. The concepts of Siegfried Kracauer, alongside those of Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, have been also used in the interpretation. These are also the authors of two crucial terms: monogram and cryptonym.

Para esse diminuto texto crítico-reflexivo, elaboramos uma resenha sobre o livro Mulheres no romance histórico contemporâneo português (2019), da professora e pesquisadora brasileira Aldinida Medeiros, por constatarmos a importância e a grande relevância do seu escrito face ao contexto sócio-político e cultural no qual estamos presenciando no Brasil. Contexto esse, não obstante, no qual ainda há uma forte reverberação de diversos discursos, ideologias e amarras sociais que beiram o retrocesso sócio, histórico, político e cultural do nosso país, principalmente, no que consiste à condição das mulheres. Portanto, percebemos a importância desse livro de Aldinida Medeiros (2019) como uma ferramenta de reflexão e, por conseguinte, um convite à ação contra os posicionamentos extremistas que agridem, violam e desvalorizam as mulheres e os seus direitos legais e civis e, de um modo geral, a sua cidadania. Pois, mesmo em pleno século XXI, em um país miscigenado e repleto de pluralidades como o Brasil, ainda há uma extrema necessidade de reflexão e letramento sócio-político por parte da sociedade brasileira. Então, é através de sua pesquisa teórico-crítica, que estuda a representatividade de quatro figuras femininas do medievo europeu, que Aldinida Medeiros (2019) nos presenteia com uma obra que não só contribui para o ambiente acadêmico-científico, mas que se configura como uma ferramenta de letramento e instrumentalização na formação de sujeitos crítico-reflexivos. Palavras-chave: Mulheres. Estudos de Gênero. Crítica Feminista. Romance Histórico Contemporâneo Português. Estudos Narratológicos. Aldinida Medeiros.

ÖZET: Bu araştırmanın amacı, Sosyal Bilgiler öğretiminde tarihsel roman kullanımına yönelik öğrenci görüşlerinin incelenmesidir. Araştırmada döküman inceleme yöntemi kullanılmıştır. Araştırmanın örneklemini Sivas il merkezinde bulunan bir devlet okulunun yedinci sınıfında öğrenim gören dört farklı sınıftan toplam sekiz öğrenci oluşturmaktadır.Araştırma, öğrencilerin sosyal bilgiler dersinde yaptığı bir yaratıcı yazma çalışması ile başlamıştır. Öğrenciler tarihsel roman okuduktan sonra, ikinci çalışma yapılmıştır. Bu çalışmadan elde edilen veriler Öztürk (2007) tarafından geliştirilen rubrik kullanılarak puanlanmıştır. En yüksek ve en düşük ilk dört puanı alan öğrenciler örneklem olarak belirlenmiştir.Veriler betimsel analiz yöntemi ile analiz edilmiş ve öğrenci görüşleri çeşitli kategoriler altında kodlanmıştır. Araştırma sonucunda öğrencilerin derslerde tarihsel roman kullanmak istedikleri, farklı kurgu biçimine sahip romanların öğrencilere farklı şeyler öğreterek onların farklı yönlerini geliştirdiği tespit edilmiştir.
ABSTRACT:
The aim of this research is to examine student views on the use of historical novels in the teaching of Social Studies. Document examination method was used in the research. The sample of the research consists of eight students from four different classes who are studying in the seventh grade of a public school in the city center of Sivas. The research began with a creative writing work done by students in social studies class. After students read historical novels, the second study was conducted. Data obtained from these studies were scored with the help of rubrik developed by Öztürk (2007). The data were analyzed by descriptive analysis method and student opinions were coded under various categories. As a result of the research, it has been determined that the students who want to use historical novels in their lessons, novels with different fiction styles develop different aspects by teaching different things to the students.

The chapter offers a close reading of Michael Irwin’s 2013 The Skull and the Nightingale. It  argues that the traditional epistolary format adopted, in a metafictional sense, provokes more general questions about the nature of reading as vicarious experience – an understanding of fiction that was also implied by a number of Georgian works, from
epistolary fictions to quixotic narratives and sentimental re- enactments of feeling.

see https://www.routledge.com/Neo-Georgian-Fiction-Reimagining-the-Eighteenth-Century-in-the-Contemporary/Lipski-Maciulewicz/p/book/9780367430146

John Barth’s 'Sot-Weed Factor' is something of a paradox: it approaches history in a self-conscious turn from realism; it assumes the mantle of the great American novel only to drape it over the model of the 18th century English novel; and its historical subject matter—America’s self-made destiny, not its manifest destiny—is captured in a parody of the historical novel. Barth’s postmodern interest in irony, parody and satire finds a suitably broad canvas in the larger than life historical accounts of adventurers and fortune hunters in search of the new world in the late 17th century. The rogues, clowns and fools in the novel are carnivalesque masks that recall the rugged spirit of the early settlers of colonial America and allow Barth to explore the self-regarding literary concerns later dubbed ‘postmodern.’

Sob a perspectiva dos estudos sobre literatura, feminino e sagrado, este artigo tem como objetivo fazer uma análise sobre D. Isabel de Aragão, protagonista do romance histórico contemporâneo português A Rainha Santa (2017), de Isabel Machado, mostrando como a personagem estabelece uma ligação com o sagrado, por vezes, através de intermediações, outras, por meio de uma relação direta com a deidade. Percebemos a relação da personagem feminina com o sagrado por intermédio de representações do divino feminino, expressões do sagrado e de conexões diretas com a divindade no contexto religioso e teocêntrico da Idade Média. A metodologia utilizada consiste em uma pesquisa de cunho bibliográfico, com abordagem de interpretação textual, remetendo ao método indutivo. Assim, fazemos uma leitura estruturalista e crítico-reflexiva da narrativa. Como aporte teórico, apoiamo-nos, dentre outros, nas concepções de Boff (2012); Campbell (2015); Clément e Kristeva (2001); Gimenez (2005); Medeiros (2013, 2019); Muraro (2002); Nogueira (2013, 2015); Otto (2007); Schwartz (2010). Em conclusão, constatamos que D. Isabel de Aragão detém uma percepção do sagrado que se caracteriza como um rosto materno de Deus, um Deus Mãe, isto é, um divino feminino, configurando, desta forma, as relações entre o feminino e o sagrado.

Palavras-chave: A Rainha Santa. D. Isabel de Aragão. Feminino. Intermediações. Sagrado.

Salman Rushdie, famous for his post-structuralist approach to history, argues that both fiction and history are human constructs, and thus they are subjective, limited and unreliable in nature. Juxtaposing fictional and historical elements in the same storyline, the author creates a new textual space where he can undermine the authority of history texts over fiction. This textual space is dominated by story tellers as proving the power of storytelling even in the history writing process. The Enchantress of Florence, telling the magical stories rooted in the history of the Mughal Empire and the Florentine Republic, supplies Rushdie with the necessary space to question the concept of the real, its production process, and the power and knowledge relationship. In this context, this article will explore Rushdie's use of storytelling, juxtaposition of real and fictional worlds, and intermingling of historical documents and magical stories in the novel to understand the manipulative role of history writers in the history writing process.

Published in 1977, Anthony Burgess’s ABBA ABBA focuses on the imaginary meeting between two emblematic nineteenth-century poets: John Keats and Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli. The novel reveals the author’s passion for Neoclassicism and Romanticism, testified by the many references to personalities such as Antonio Canova, Lord Byron and Paolina Bonaparte. By examining the narrative technique employed by Burgess in evoking the lucid desperation of the young English poet, the essay aims to investigate the ways in which the author managed to translate the last events of Keats’s biography into a compact and sparkling reconstruction of late Romanticism itself.

https://romanticismi-rivistadelcrier.dlls.univr.it/article/view/1055

The present study offers a poetics of science in the contemporary historical, and more specifically, neo-Victorian novel. Its starting point is both the profound (dis)similarity between science and history, and Ansgar Nünning’s pathbreaking systematisation of the historical novel. The poetics itself is based on a rigorous development and application of four hypotheses. These hypotheses are a direct result of the interdisciplinary nature of a study with at least three, if not four, epistemological concerns, for this is a study of «science» in a «literary» context which deals with «history,» specifically history of the «Victorian» period. Each of the four terms forms the basis for one of the hypotheses. The poetics is tested on two novels which have proved to be land-marks in neo-Victorian fiction: Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990).

In this paper my aim is to study Gore Vidal’s novel Hollywood, published in 1990, in order to examine how the writer associates the capital of American politics with the capital of popular entertainment and how the historical novel becomes a controversial medium/space for the representation of war and its interaction with film. I am particularly interested in analysing how Vidal discusses the major political and ideological role played by cinema, so that American people could be persuaded to give support to the country’s participation in the unpopular First World War. Moreover, I intend to discuss how Vidal addresses the ideological consolidation of the American empire and its political implications through the screening of history, thus questioning how literature and movies might be considered contentious political instruments.

If John Barth’s first two novels reopen the wound left by the disenchantment of the world—the need for meaning amidst nihilism—then his third, 'The Sot-Weed Factor' (1960), tries to dress it. Disenchantment frees the self from the limits of custom and tradition on the one hand, but robs it of a scale of values by which to orient its conduct on the other; once all such scales are deemed equally valid and thus equally arbitrary, they can only be adhered to by the cynical, the stupid or the self-stupefied. In a climate of confused values, the imposter emerges as the hero of the post-heroic age. Barth’s early work was coupled with the existentialism at large in the 1950s and the paradoxical quest for myth in demythologized modernity. The new myth centres on the self, at once ontologically empty and mimetically full. The agency of narrative art in Sot-Weed is quixotic, or so I contend in this paper.

In this podcast, I will be talking about the Renaissance, and I will be explaining how it came to be conceptualized as a historical period. There were three important conceptual shifts that occurred since the 16th century. The first reconceptualization occurred in the 18th century, when the revival of Antiquity that occurred during the Renaissance was perceived as having failed to produce the kind of « enlightened » culture which is now linked with humanism. The second shift happened in the 19th century, when a Conservative reaction against modernity came to idealize the Middle Ages, while the Renaissance, identified with the « Early modern period », was perceived as being at the roots of «bad» things such as individualism, industrialism and secularism. A third shift occurred recently, in the 1970’s-1980’s, when a « postmodern » view of the Renaissance started to focus historical research on previously marginal figures belonging to sexual, religious and economic minority groups.

NB: This paper was produced for the CKUT "Brain waves: student research on air" program during the month of October 2016. It was not yet recorded with the radio for funding and organizational reasons which have nothing to do with the author of this article.

This article aims to briefly present a dynamic branch of contemporary
narrative studies, called “unnatural narratology”, taking the example of a Belgian French language novel, published in 2007, namely Les Vivants et les Ombres, by Diane Meur. The author examines the non-human narrator of this text in order to identify his specificity, both at the level of his narrative practices and from the angle of his influence on the generic dimension of the text. The conclusion emphasizes the contemporary transformations of the historical novel, due in particular to the introduction of “unnatural” narrative instances that can be interpreted in the light of the posthumanist tendencies of contemporary culture and the characteristics of postmodern literature.

Im Aufsatz wird zunächst auf die Sonderstellung der Uchronie innerhalb der romanhaften Geschichtsdarstellungen eingegangen. Anschließend werden zwei parahistorische Romane der Gegenwart analysiert, in denen die Autoren auf unterschiedliche Weise mit Kontrafakturen der eigenen Nationalgeschichte arbeiten: Michael Kleebergs "Ein Garten im Norden" (1998) und Christian Krachts "Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten" (2008). Dabei wird vor allem die utopische Dimension im ersten, die dystopisch-apokalyptische im zweiten Roman fokussiert, um aufzuzeigen, welche Möglichkeiten das Erfinden von Geschichte eröffnen kann. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit wird darüber hinaus dem erinnerungskulturellen und gegenwartskritischen Potenzial der Texte sowie ihrer unterschiedlichen Lösung des Konflikts zwischen Faktizität und Fiktion auf formal-ästhetischer Ebene geschenkt.

"Mi vida en media página",  en Escritores ante el espejo. Estudios de la creatividad literaria, ed. Anthony Percival, Barcelona, Lumen, 1997, pp. 313-321.
La lectura de un pequeño fragmento de la novela de metaficción historiográfica  "El sueño de Venecia", de Paloma Díaz-Mas, revela los elementos autobiográficos (no siempre evidentes y no siempre conscientes) incluidos en la narración.