The Novel as History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Brannigan
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Marked Contrast ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
End Of History ◽  
Postmodern Fiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
The End Of History

This chapter discusses the historiographic nature of postmodern novels. The predominance of the historiographic in postmodern fiction is in marked contrast to modernism. Here, postmodernism is distinguished in fiction by its preoccupation with the past. The most striking feature of postmodern fiction is its reinvention of the historical novel. The postmodern historical novel prefers narratives of catastrophe and exhaustion to revolutionary progress or national awakening. Yet as much as it seemed to coincide with the currency of a facile notion of ‘the end of history’, the emergence of ‘historiographic metafiction’ signalled instead the revival of a critical sense of historicity, in which the fabulous and the unbelievable could make ‘history’ credible again.

The enduring stuff of narrative

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Toon Staes
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
End Of History ◽  
Postindustrial Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The End Of History ◽  
The Individual

The reevaluation of the past in Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Cosmopolis can be seen as a valuable counterargument to Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalistic claim that contemporary society heralds the end of history. The sublime multiplicity of history in both novels illustrates how time eventually collapses in the eternal present of capital and technology. Consequently, it appears that postindustrial society draws in the individual to create a system with no outside. DeLillo’s historiographic metafiction nonetheless shows how rewriting the past can prevent history from being conclusive and teleological. Narrative therefore provides an alternative to established History — in which all events connect in light of the inevitable — but it also resists the solipsistic void of speculation and hearsay.

scholarly journals Reanimating the English Historical Novel in the Twenty-First Century – The Case of David Mitchell’s the Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-222
Author(s):  
Bożena Kucała
Keyword(s):  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historiographic Metafiction ◽  
The Past ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
Present Tense ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract This article argues that David Mitchell’s novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) represents a new variation of the genre of historical fiction. The historical novel in Britain has risen to prominence since the 1980s and in the twenty-first century this strong interest in the past continues. Placing David Mitchell’s book in the context of recent historical fiction, the article takes account of Joseph Brooker’s hypothesis that, together with Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet may be indicative of an emergent trend in the contemporary English historical novel. The purpose of the article is to identify and explore Mitchell’s key strategies of writing about history. It is argued that, departing from the prevalent mode of historiographic metafiction, Mitchell’s book adheres to some of the traditional tenets of the genre while achieving the Scottian aim of animating the past in innovative ways. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the use of the present tense, the subjective perspectives, and the exclusion of foreknowledge lend the novel dramatic qualities.

The End of History Museums: What's Plan B??

2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cary Carson
Keyword(s):  
Historic Sites ◽  
The Public ◽  
End Of History ◽  
House Museums ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Museums ◽  
Plan B ◽  
The End Of History ◽  
The Way

Abstract Are historic sites and house museums destined to go the way of Oldsmobiles and floppy disks?? Visitation has trended downwards for thirty years. Theories abound, but no one really knows why. To launch a discussion of the problem in the pages of The Public Historian, Cary Carson cautions against the pessimistic view that the past is simply passéé. Instead he offers a ““Plan B”” that takes account of the new way that learners today organize information to make history meaningful.

History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich's Tracks

PMLA ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 109 (5) ◽  
pp. 982-994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy J. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
American History ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Native American History ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Historical Accounts

The deconstruction of history by poststructuralists and some philosophers of history has occurred at the moment when women and indigenous peoples have begun to write their own historical accounts. Louise Erdrich's historical novel, Tracks, brings into focus the necessity and the difficulties of writing Native American history in a postmodern epoch. The novel addresses two crucial issues: the referential value of history (If it is impossible to know the past fully, is it impossible to know the past at all?) and the status of history as narrative (If history is just a story, how is it possible to discriminate between one story and another?). Erdrich's novel suggests the need for indigenous histories to counter the dominant narrative, in which the settling of America is “progress,” but also works toward a new historicity that is neither a simple return to historical realism nor a passive acceptance of postmodern historical fictionality.

scholarly journals The Difficulty of Historical Work in the Nineteenth-Century Museum and the Thackeray Novel

2012 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dehn Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
The Past ◽  
Important Impact ◽  
Full Reconstruction ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

This essay suggests that conservation debates occasioned by the democratization of the nineteenth-century museum had an important impact on William Makepeace Thackeray’s reimagination of the historical novel. Both the museum and the historical novel had traditionally made it their mission to present the past to an ever-widening public, and thus necessarily to preserve it. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, the museum and the novel also shared the experience of seeming to endanger precisely what they sought to protect, and as they tried to choose how aggressive to be in their conserving measures, they had to deliberate about the costs and benefits of going after the full reconstruction (the novel) or restoration (the museum) of what once had been. The first part of this essay shows how people fretted about the relation of conservation, destruction, and national identity at the museum, in The Times and in special Parliamentary sessions alike; the second part of the essay traces how Thackeray drew on the resulting debates in novels including The Newcomes (1853–55) and The History of Henry Esmond (1852), as he looked for a way to revivify the historical novel after it had gone out of fashion. He invoked broken statues and badly restored pictures as he navigated his own worries that he might be doing history all wrong, and damaging its shape in the process.

Reading the Historical Novel: Reworking the Past and the Relation of Blackfeet History in James Welch's Fools Crow

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
SARAH MARTIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The Novel ◽  
James Welch ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Impact

The article considers the political impact of the historical novel by examining an example of the genre by Native American novelist James Welch. It discusses how the novel Fools Crow represents nineteenth-century Blackfeet experience, emphasizing how (retelling) the past can act in the present. To do this it engages with psychoanalytic readings of historical novels and the work of Foucault and Benjamin on memory and history. The article concludes by using Bhabha's notion of the “projective past” to understand the political strength of the novel's retelling of the story of a massacre of Native Americans.

Recognition, Deference, and Respect: Generalizing the Lessons of an Asymmetric Asian Order

2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 105-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brantly Womack
Keyword(s):  
The West ◽  
Meiji Japan ◽  
End Of History ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rise Of China ◽  
History Of ◽  
World Economic ◽  
The End Of History ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractAs many distinguished academics and officials have pointed out, the current rise of China is not a completely new phenomenon, but rather the return of China to a position of regional centrality and world economic share that were considered normal less than two hundred years ago.1 This fact underlines the importance of history in putting the present into perspective, and at the same time, to the extent that all history is history of the present, it requires a reevaluation of the structure of China's traditional relationships. Hitherto, China's place in modern social science has been in an exotic corner, a failed oriental despotism. To be sure, traditional China did collapse, and today's China is a different China rising in a different world. We might assume that China is rising now precisely because of its differences from traditional China, that it is the last step toward the end of history rather than a resonance with the past. However, the convenience of such an assumption makes it suspect. If China is simply the latest avatar of Western modernity, then it requires of the West some readjustment, but not rethinking. However, the only certainty about China's rise is that it is a complex phenomenon, and the convenience of constructions such as China-as-Prussia or China-as-Meiji Japan derives from their preemption of open-ended study rather than from their insight into complexity. To the extent that China is China, both past and present require reconsideration.

scholarly journals ARTIKULASI IDENTITAS LOKAL CEPU DALAM NOVEL PENANGSANG: TEMBANG RINDU DENDAM KARYA NASSIRUN PURWOKARTUN (TINJAUAN NEW HISTORICISM)

SUAR BETANG ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-78
Author(s):  
Sukarjo Waluyo
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Local Identity ◽  
Text Data ◽  
The Past ◽  
Literary Research

Literature of a cultural product always interacts with social problems, including issues of locality and local identity. The problem of local identity in the novel Penangsang: Tembang Rindu Dendam is the main concern in this study. The background of the local locality and identity of Cepu which became the center of the Duchy of Jipang in the past was the setting of a place, as well as a space where the final historical and cultural journey of the power of the Demak Sultanate took place. This novel was written in 2010 by Nassirun Purwokartun. This historical novel invites us to rethink Cepu's locality and local identity, which has been a legacy of past generations. Articulation of identity and locality issues seem to be the attention voiced in this novel as well as being an instrument or instrument of articulation. This study uses the New Historicism approach, one literary theory that views history, art, and other things in society has the same degree as the text data in literature. It is hoped that literary research will get the context of the problem in accordance with the situation of the community.

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