Redefining Nationhood and Nationality through Historiographic Metafiction in the Shadow Lines

Purpose: Postmodernism is a general movement that developed in the late 20th century across the arts, philosophy, art, architecture, and criticism, marking a disappearance from modernism. The term has been more often used to describe a historical age which followed after modernity. Postmodernism is a period of uprising which refers to ups and downs in each walk of life and the different disciplines of knowledge be it literary work, philosophy, or science. Postmodern literature revokes some modern literary methods by transforming them. Historiographic Metafiction is a contradictory term that consists of two opposite categories such as history and metafiction. It is having dual representations because such writings reflect the reality as well as fictional position. An attempt is made by the Post-colonial Indian English writers to liberate Indian English literature from the foreign bondage. Historical events such as agitations, migration, movements, refugees, colonial hegemony; social-economic and cultural problems like encounter of the east-west, caste, and class became the concerns of the writers. Design/Methodology/Approach: This paper is prepared by making a study of Primary source and accumulating secondary data from educational websites and written publications. This qualitative research is carried out by studying and interpreting the existing knowledge on the subject. The paper tries to analyze the historiographic metafictional features as depicted in The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh. Findings/Result: After reviewing many articles, books and thesis it has been found that the paper aims to study Amitav Ghosh's notions like ‟ Nationhood and National distinctiveness in "The Shadow Lines” as a reminiscence novel, highlights a few historical happenings like the Second World War, the Swadeshi movement, and the Partition of India in 1947 and communal uprisings in Bangladesh and India. The ardent nationalism upheld by the protagonist that is the narrator’s grandmother is questioned and re-analysed. Ghosh searches for appropriateness of traditional identity such as nation and nationalism. Originality/Value: This paper makes a study of the major character Thamma with special reference to her concerns of Nationhood and Nationality. The identity of Thamma in the novel is given prominence being a woman she stands for her thoughts and identifies her as an individual who faced tragedy but still who had the courage to raise her voice till the end. Paper Type: Analytical Research paper.

Keats's Haggard Shadow

This article discusses how John Keats’s biography and poetry exerted influence on the development of the plot, structure, protagonists and metaphorical framework of Patrick McGrath’s novel Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993). Furthermore, it contends that the novel does not simply aim to pay tribute to Keats or to function as a literary emulation or even mimicry of Keats’s life and oeuvre. Instead, the novel suggests a postmodernist comment on Keatsian Romanticism as expressed in Keats’s poetry. An interpretation of Dr Haggard’s Disease as historiographic metafiction with an emphasis on the intertextual links between McGrath’s novel and Keats’s work makes clear that the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Edward Haggard, by way of subversion and distortion devaluates the Keatsian dichotomies of real/ideal and Truth/Beauty.

Historiographic Metafiction and the Metaphysical Detective in Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet

Roberto Bolaño’s Amulet explores the writing of history as an attempt to construct a narrative from a multitude of unreliable and conflicting sources. As a result, any attempt at historiography is also plagued by the problems of representation found in literature. More particularly, not unlike detective fiction, history is concerned with identifying the inspirations and actions of its players and with revealing the truth about an episode or series of episodes, using historical information, all of which may or may not be reliable. By examining the relationship between the historical and the fictional in Amulet this paper will discuss Bolaño’s use of the tropes of metaphysical detective fiction and how they help foreground the difficulties posed by historical facts by reinventing them in fiction. This will, in turn, highlight the intersection between detective fiction and historiographic metafiction and how by combining these two genres writers can reimagine historical contexts and find new meanings and significance.

Plastic (in) Paradise: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

This contribution examines the magic-realist metaphor of the Matacão in Karen Tei Yamashita’s (1990) debut novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest as a trope that invites us to imagine, reflect on, and explore plastic’s cross-cultural meanings, aesthetic experiences, and materialist implications. I contend that through the Matacão, Yamashita engenders a narrative about, as well as an aesthetic experience of, plastic that is inherently ambivalent and paradoxical. While it provides societies with material wealth and sensual pleasures, it poses at the same time a profound threat to life – human and nonhuman. The main part of the article is divided into two major sections: in the first part, I read Yamashita’s story about the Matacão as historiographic metafiction that parodies the socio-cultural history of plastic and its utopian promises and failures. In the second part, I draw on Catherine Malabou’s philosophical concept of plasticity to explore the Matacão’s material agency, as well as the social mobility and economic connectivity of Yamashita’s human protagonists in their plastic environments. The theoretical perspective of Malabou’s concept of plasticity shifts the focus to the agentic forces of the waste material and allows us to read Yamashita’s Matacão as both a site and material that, notwithstanding its devastating impacts, also holds potentialities for resilience and repair, and even the possibility for an, at least temporary, utopia.

SLAVE RESISTANCE AND DECOLONIZING CARIBBEAN HISTORY IN ANDREA LEVY’S THE LONG SONG

Set during the final days of Slavery on the island of Jamaica, Andrea Levy’s 2010 novel, The Long Song is a neo-slave narrative that explores the nature of slave resistance and colonial historiographical control. When read through a postcolonial lens, The Long Song takes the form of a counter-discourse, where the main character of Miss July offers a corrective to the dominant white narratives of Caribbean history. This essay argues that the experience of resistance in Levy’s narrative is one of literary mimicry, analysing July’s written resistance as it answers back to and confronts the colonial narratives that disregard the oppressed individual experience from history. Levy, in reanimating the history of Jamaican slavery by aligning her text with the unheard ‘History From Below’ perspective, demonstrates and replicates the unreliable narratives orchestrated by those ‘From Above’. As such, both Levy and her fictional July employ a method of historiographic metafiction to reclaim the previously silenced voice of the Jamaican slaves that the hegemonic White Planter class seek to oppress and obliterate from historical record. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0751/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Merging Fact, Fiction and Myth: Reading TD Ramakrishnan’s Sugandhi Enna Aandaal Devanayaki as a Historiographic Metafiction

TD Ramakrishnan’s novel Sugandhi Enna Aandaal Devanayaki is a mixture of the mythological, metaphysical and historical into a fictional space which transcends the boundaries of nation. The novel is a quest for retelling the historical trauma of Sreelanka. In the search for Sugandhi a Tamil liberation activist, the narrator stumbles upon the mythical Sugandhi from the folklore, creating tension between faction and reality. In the search for the mythical Sugandhi Ramakrishnan uses ‘SusinaSupina’ and arrives at Devanayaki belonging to 7th century AD Pallava Dynasty. As fact, fiction and myth blur into the contemporary social space, the myth of Devanayaki merges with Rajani Thirinagame creating the notion of the alternate history from a female perspective. In the novel History blurs into myth, reality into fiction, contemporary into past, individual into society and body into spirit.TD Ramakrishnan deconstructs the millennium old Tamil- Sinhalese political history using the alternate history from mythology and folklore. This paper is an attempt to read the novel Sugandhi Enna AandaalDevanayaki as a Historiographic metafiction.

Gonçalo Cadilhe nos trilhos de Santo António em Portugal: Intimidades de um Olhar em Por Este Reino Acima. No Primeiro Trekking da História de Portugal

A well-known figure on the stage of contemporary Portuguese travel literature with already fifteen published works, Gonçalo Cadilhe focuses on issues of identity, imagology, space, textual and ontological nature, almost always using the format of the journalistic chronicle, among other brief forms. In fact, this is an author whose writing emerges from a work with a structural spatial referentiality in the travelogue, as a look that comes to rest on a physical and human geography. Thus, starting from the work Por este reino acima. No primeiro trekking da História de Portugal (2020), I intend to problematize the author's gaze on the interior of Portugal today, along his walk in the footsteps of young Santo António, aiming to collect, not only the current images of the country, but also to underline his debut through the webs of fictional narrative. Above all, the book focuses on the first trekking of a Portuguese travel writer through national geographic territories and historiographic metafiction, on the recreation of the biography of Santo António on a journey through the textual space where a porous writing arises, betting on the convergence between the real and the fiction or just a “frictional literature” (Ette 2003:31)