History of Alternative Histories: Towards an Extro-historical Fiction

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 175-192
Author(s):  
Kyunghwan Oh
Author(s):  
Roslyn Weaver

This chapter discusses the history of popular fiction in Australia. The question of place has always been central to Australian fiction, not only as a thematic element but also as a critical or political preoccupation. In part, this is because popular fiction writers, wanting to attract broad audiences, either exploited their Australian content to appeal to international readers or have excised the local to produce a generic and thus more readily accessible setting for outsiders. The chapter considers works by popular fiction writers who adopt a range of positions in relation to their focus on place, but often tackle many different aspects of Australian social and historical change. These novels cover various genres such as crime fiction, historical fiction and romance, science fiction and fantasy, and include Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Damien Broderick's The Dreaming Dragons (1980), and Cecilia Dart-Thornton's The Ill-Made Mute (2001).


PMLA ◽  
1932 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Blair

Courthope, in his History of English Poetry, asks the question: “Does Spenser's work satisfy the test of Unity which must be applied to every great creation of art?” Answering this question, Courthope thinks that there is undoubtedly poetical unity in the general conception of The Shepherd's Calendar. But of the Faerie Queene, he says the following:There is undoubtedly a noble, indeed a sublime, foundation for the poem in its central design “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” There is also something eminently poetical in the intention of embodying this image in the ideal knight—a figure consecrated like that of the shepherd, by ancient literary tradition—and in the person of “Arthur before he was king.” Moreover, as the subject was to be treated allegorically, it was open to Spenser to endow his knight with the “twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised.” … No poem in existence can compare with the Faery Queen in the richness of its materials. But the question occurs: In what way is all this “variety of matter” fused with the central image of the “brave knight, perfected in all the twelve private moral virtues”? For this, we must always remember, was Spenser's professed and primary motive; he chose to convey his moral in a form of allegorical narrative, because he thought it would be “most plausible and pleasing, being covered with an historical fiction.”


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Rahmawan Jatmiko

Assassin’s Creed is a historical fiction video game developed and published by Ubisoft. This video game has been so far considered as one of the most violent video games. Assassin’s Creed III is the third sequel of which plot is set in a fictional history of real world events and follows the centuries-old conflict between the Assassins and the Templars. Based on this study, the plot, characters, characterization, and scenes in Assassin’s Creed III are deemed to be able to give positive teachings to the young generation, despite the fact that there are violent and sadistic scenes in the story. Haytham Kenway, who is “evil” protagonist in Assassin’s Creed Forsaken, is portrayed as an expert in using weapons, since he was kid. Separated from his family, Kenway was taken by mysterious mentor, who trained him to be the most deadly killer. Comparisons with classic characters such as Oedipus, Hamlet, or Indonesian legendary character Sangkuriang are intentionally made to sharpen the analysis. The finding of this study is that heroic value might be found in either protagonist or antagonistic characters, whose roles involved numerous violent actions. Comments from the official website and social media which claim that Assassin’s Creed has brought negative impacts on the consumers might not be totally true.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Austin Graham

Abstract “The Unacknowledged War” is an inquiry into the phenomenon of Civil War revisionism, focusing on the tendency of white Americans to deny, against all available evidence, that the “war between the states” was waged over slavery. In doing so, the essay turns to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s grievously understudied 1901 novel The Fanatics, a historical fiction of the war years that focuses on the white North and argues that the Unionists who battled the Confederacy did so only because they wrongly believed that the war’s purpose had nothing to do with enslaved Black Americans. The essay also shows how Dunbar’s novel contributes to several fields of contemporary intellectual interest, among them Civil War studies, Afropessimist thought, and a cross-disciplinary investigation of negative epistemologies known as “ignorance studies.” Ultimately, the essay concludes that Civil War revisionism has yet to show signs of ebbing in American historical consciousness and that ignorance-oriented novels like Dunbar’s are indispensable partners for approaching this persistent problem.


2020 ◽  
pp. 235-252
Author(s):  
Sue Thomas

Sue Thomas uses this chapter to explore recent academic and creative projects about Mary Prince that reframe and add complexity to her story. Prince, enslaved in Bermuda, Grand Turk Island, Antigua and London, is best remembered for her influential slave narrative, The History of Mary Prince, published in 1831 by Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. The text was a graphic exposé of the atrocities of slavery and brought about a libel case against Pringle by one of Prince’s former owners. Thomas looks at work about Prince including Margot Maddison-MacFadyen’s archival research used both in her PhD dissertation and her historical fiction novella for young readers; themes of other-mothering explored in the poetry of Joan Anim-Addo; a video installation by Joscelyn Gardner using a toy theatre set that reflects on performative aspects of history through Prince’s story; and work by Cynthia M. Kennedy and Michele Speitz which brings attention to the harsh conditions of slaves working in Caribbean salt ponds as described by Prince. Finally, Thomas explores Prince’s conversion to Moravianism and how her experience of slavery chafed against the religious philosophy of quietism.


2019 ◽  
pp. 193-200
Author(s):  
Mykola Korpaniuk

The article is devoted to the study of D.Chyzhevsky’s contribution to the analysis of the artistic filling of ancient chronicles through the use of the stylistic method of analysis. An important conclusion is the assertion of the national chronicles of the eleventh and thirteenth centuries that their authors are highly educated, good connoisseurs of the Bible, ancient, Byzantine literatures, works by Homer, Joseph Flavius, George Hamartol, Joan Malalai, the Byzantine chronograph, Alexandria, especially popular in the princely environment, and the images of Alexander of Macedon, Darius, reproduced in it, as well as the image of Hercules, were close and exemplary for our princes. As for the brief history of national writing, D.Chyzhevsky, analyzing the historical and aesthetic canvas of the chronicles of the eleventh and eighteenth centuries, adequately and convincingly characterized the artistic value and originality of memorials, revealed the crucial importance in their creation of the high erudition available to the authors, the thorough knowledge of the history of Ukrainian and foreign, in particular of ancient, literatures; emphasized in the chroniclers the literary ability, heroic and patriotic abilities, national centrism and moral and religious nobility, attachment to traditions, a part of the literary and chronicles, which contributed to the writing of majestic epic paintings addressed to the depicted and described heroes of works. The historian of literature has convincingly proved that such a long-term development of the genre of the chronicles (XI-XVIII centuries) was facilitated by the content-artistic perfection of «The Tale of the Past Years», the talent of its founders, Nikon, Nestor, Sylvester, whose own work, the idea of unity of Russia in the struggle against internal and external enemies, which remained urgent throughout all subsequent centuries, and a significant conservatism of the genre, focused on the upbringing of historical generic, national, cultural memories, laid the solid foundations for the development of our entire national first literature which convincingly demonstrate chronicles, historical fiction themes XIX-XXI centuries. The own «History of Ukrainian Literature», the level and conclusions of the analysis of the chronicles D.Chyzhevsky scientifically reasonably developed the principle of national centrist, founded in his medieval works by M.Maksymovych and confirmed by the formation and development of our literary thought. In them, the doctrine proved that in the analysis of ancient writing, chronicles must use a stylistic approach to express their artistic, their aesthetic nature and value. The new thought of the scientist was his noteworthy that the chronicles have signs of the classical direction, characteristic of the works of the elite princely-Sarmatian and Cossack-Kozar tribes.


2006 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNE E. MCLAREN

For over a millennium, the issue of the Shu-Han succession during the Three Kingdoms era (220–265 CE) has served as a proxy for debates about the relative merits of territorial control, blood relationship, and moral qualifications as grounds for imperial legitimacy in China. Debate reached a new height after the fall of north China during the twelfth century, a period when a revitalization of Confucian studies led to a greater interest in the publishing of private histories. This article deals with two little-known revisions of the official history of the Three Kingdoms period, the Sanguozhi, that sought to reflect the legitimacy debate at a time of alien conquest. It is argued that revisionist historians deviated from the norms of traditional historiography by devising new narrative strategies to further their political agenda. These innovations in turn influenced the formation of a new genre of historical fiction.


2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 389a-389a
Author(s):  
Henri Lauzière

Scholars have long struggled with various and even conflicting historical narratives and definitions of Salafism (al-salafiyya), but a closer look at the history of the concept itself—rather than of the ideas for which it stands—goes a long way toward explaining the perennial confusion that has typified this religious orientation. This article examines the production of knowledge about Salafism as a conceptual construct and a typological category. It argues that although Salafi epithets have existed since the medieval period, they did not start referring to a religious concept known as salafiyya until the 1920s. By the same token, the widely accepted idea that salafiyya referred to an Islamic modernist movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a historical fiction that originates with Louis Massignon. The history of Cairo's Salafiyya Press and Bookstore, however, sheds important light on the process by which the construction of Salafism took place.


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