Alternative Histories in Youssef Ziedan's Azazeel : Historiographic Metafiction in the Contemporary Arabic Historical Novel)

This article aims to analyze Athial’s Hitler and the Decline of Shah Dynasty to prove that the author reimagines and rewrites official history in his novel with combination and blurring of fact and fiction. It is studied from theoretical parameters of historiographic metafiction. Through an amalgamation of fact and fiction, the novel challenges the traditional version of the official history of Nepal and Germany. The subjectivity inherent in historiographic narratives is further explored through Athial’s representation of historical character Hitler in the novel. The presence of major characters creates confusion about the nature of the novel as a work of fiction or as historiographic account. Through the use of irony and supernatural elements, Hitler and the Decline of Shah Dynasty becomes a parody of historiographic narratives which claim to be objective. The blurring of the boundaries between fiction and history and constructedness of history through discourse is the main idea in this paper. The writer imitates the genre of the historical novel but reveals its limitations and corresponds to what Linda Hutcheon calls historiographic metafiction. The novel mines the elements of the then history of Hitler, Germany, and Nepalese Shah Dynasty with the personal history of the author to revise and redefine the official version of history. This revisiting of mainstream history helps to establish the notion of plurality of historical accounts and a rejection of objectivity in historical writings. This novel has metafictional mode of writing, and the author represents metafictional parody in which historical incidents are repeated with a difference to show that history is discourse and is always open to interpretation.

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Unauthorized Storytelling: Reevaluating Racial Politics in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies

MELUS ◽

10.1093/melus/mlz067 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 45 (1) ◽

pp. 95-116

Author(s):

Tegan Zimmerman

Keyword(s):

Dominican Republic ◽

Essential Role ◽

Historical Novel ◽

Racial Politics ◽

Slave Narratives ◽

The Novel ◽

Historiographic Metafiction ◽

Postcolonial Feminist ◽

Insight Into

Abstract This article revisits Julia Alvarez’s critically acclaimed historical novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). While much scholarship has paid attention to the novel as historiographic metafiction, its depiction of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s regime (1930-61), and its feminist perspective on the Dominican Republic, its racial politics are under-studied. In particular, scholars have overlooked Fela, the Afra-Dominican servant, spirit medium, and storyteller. I argue that studying Fela’s presence in the text as an unauthorized and unauthored voice not only adds complexity to the production of historiography and storytelling but also provides new insight into postcolonial feminist critiques of voice/lessness, narrative, and marginalized identities in the novel and criticism on it. Closely analyzing Fela’s voice—as it intersects with storytelling, historical slave narratives, Vodou, the maternal, and Haiti’s contribution to the Dominican Republic’s history—makes visible the unacknowledged yet essential role of the Afra-Dominican not only in this novel specifically but also to the Dominican Republic more generally.

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Do retrato à caricatura: a figuração da personagem histórica em Saramago e Assis Brasil

Navegações ◽

10.15448/1983-4276.2016.2.18482 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 161

Author(s):

Maria Regina Barcelos Bettiol

Keyword(s):

Historical Novel ◽

Historiographic Metafiction ◽

History Of ◽

Jose Saramago ◽

Painting And Literature ◽

The Aesthetic

O presente ensaio analisa, através de uma analogia entre a pintura e a literatura, a figuração da personagem histórica nos romances História do Cerco de Lisboa de José Saramago e A Margem Imóvel do Rio de Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil, demonstrando que na passagem do romance histórico tradicional para a metaficcção historiográfica, essa categoria de personagem perde a sua força representativa ficando em segundo plano na narrativa. Se no romance histórico tradicional encontramos um retrato da personagem histórica, na metaficção historiográfica existe uma deformação sobre o plano estético isto é, a tendência em representá-la de forma caricatural.********************************************************************From portrait to caricature: the figuration of the historical characterin Saramago and Assis BrasilAbstract: This essay examines, through an analogy between painting and literature, the figuration of the historical character in two novels (José Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon and Luiz Antonio de Assis Brasil’s A Margem Imóvel do Rio). It shows that in the passage from the traditional historical novel to the “historiographic metafiction” this kind of character loses its representative force and it becomes less important in the narrative. If in the traditional historical novel we find a portrait of the historical character, in historiographic metafiction” there is a deformation on the aesthetic level, that is to say, a tendency to represent it in caricature form.Keywords: character; figuration; historical novel; metafiction.

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Pushing the Boundaries of Historiographic Metafiction: Temporal Instability, ‘Authority’ and Authorship in The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus; with Stephen Marlowe

ODISEA Revista de estudios ingleses ◽

10.25115/odisea.v0i7.136 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Mónica Calvo Pascual

Keyword(s):

Historical Novel ◽

The Self ◽

Christopher Columbus ◽

Historiographic Metafiction ◽

Innovative Strategy ◽

Temporal Instability ◽

Special Case ◽

The U.S

Tras presentar la novela de Stephen Marlowe The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus (1987) como un ejemplo prototípico de ‘metaficción historiográfica’, este artí- culo estudia las características que la alejan de la tradición norteamericana. La posición de un personaje histórico como narrador autodiegético y crítico de sus propios biógrafos trae consigo una radicalización de los ataques contra la autoridad, eficiencia y “objetividad” de la Historia convencionalmente vertidos por la metaficción historiográfica. Marlowe utiliza esta estrategia innovadora para llevar más allá no sólo la deslegitimación de la historiografía tradicional, sino también el desafío auto-deconstructivo de los conceptos de autoridad y autoría en la propia novela de Marlowe.Palabras clave: Historia, metaficción historiográfica, inestabilidad temporal, autoridad.Abstract:After presenting Stephen Marlowe’s 1987 The Memoirs of Christopher Columbus as a prototypical example of ‘historiographic metafiction,’ this paper focuses on the features that make it a special case in the U.S. trend of postmodern historical novel. The positioning of a historical personage as autodiegetic narrator and critic of earlier historiography on his life and enterprise brings about a radicalization of the attacks upon the authority, efficiency and ‘objectivity’ of History. This innovative strategy is used to further not only the novel’s de-legitimatization of traditional historiography but also the self-deconstructive challenge it launches against the concepts of authority and authorship in Marlowe’s novel itself.Keywords: History, Historiographic metafiction, temporal instability, authority

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

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia ◽

10.2478/stap-2018-0009 ◽

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.

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The Novel as History

10.1093/oso/9780198749394.003.0016 ◽

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.

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