Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical NovelJohn Benjamins Publishing, 1 jan 1991 - 218 pagina's This is a postmodernist history of the historical novel with special attention to the political implications of the postmodernist attitude toward the past. Beginning with the poetics of Sir Walter Scott, Wesseling moves via a global survey of 19th century historical fiction to modernist innovations in the genre. Noting how the self-reflexive strategy enables a novelist to represent an episode from the past alongside the process of gathering and formulating historical knowledge, the author discusses the elaboration of this strategy, introduced by novelists such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, in the work of, among others, Julian Barnes, Jay Cantor, Robert Coover and Graham Swift.Wesseling also shows how postmodernist writers attempt to envisage alternative sequences for historical events. Deliberately distorting historical facts, authors of such uchronian fiction, like Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael R. Read, Salman Rushdie and Gunter Grass, imagine what history looks like from the perspective of the losers, rather than the winners. |
Inhoudsopgave
I Postmodernism and History | 1 |
II Some Theoretical Deliberations About Genre | 17 |
III The Classical Model of Historical Fiction | 27 |
IV Modernist Experiments With the Historical Novel | 67 |
V Fiction Historical and Scientific | 93 |
VI SelfReflexivity in Postmodernist Historical Fiction | 117 |
VII Alternate Histories | 155 |
Conclusion | 193 |
197 | |
213 | |
Overige edities - Alles bekijken
Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist innovations of the historical novel Elisabeth Wesseling Gedeeltelijke weergave - 1991 |
Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel Elisabeth Wesseling Geen voorbeeld beschikbaar - 1991 |
Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel Elisabeth Wesseling Geen voorbeeld beschikbaar - 1991 |
Veelvoorkomende woorden en zinsdelen
Absalom alternate histories argues attempts Barth Book of Thoth canonized history Cantor century characters Chatterton classical historical novel clearly concept consciousness contemporary conventions Coover counterfactual conjecture critics deconstruction diachronic documents Enzian epistemological epochs external narrator fact Ferron Flaubert's Flaubert's Parrot future genre Gravity's Rainbow Guevara Hereros historian historical events historical fiction historical knowledge historical materials historical novel historiography Hutcheon ideal imagination interpretation invented Linda Hutcheon literature McHale metahistorical Midnight's Children mode Mumbo Jumbo narrative nineteenth-century novelists object official historiography parody past perspective plot political possibilities postmodernism postmodernist historical fiction postmodernist writers present problem Pynchon question reader reality Reed reference repertoire retrospective rocket role Saleem science fiction Scott Scott's fiction self-reflexive self-reflexive historical Sot-Weed Factor specific Stencil story strategies teleological tion tradition Turkenvespers turn twentieth-century uchronian fiction versions of history Waverley Novels Western history Woolf