Writing History as a Prophet
Postmodernist innovations of the historical novel
1st Edition
Published on 5. December 1991
IX, 218 pages
978-90-272-7760-2 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
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12/1991
John Benjamins Publishing Co
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Content
- WRITING HISTORY AS A PROPHET
- Editorial page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Table of contents
- Preface
- I. Postmodernism and History
- A Revival of Historical Fiction
- The Corpus of Postmodernist Historical Fiction
- The Delineation of Postmodernism
- Postmodernism and Deconstruction
- Linda Hutcheon's Poetics of Postmodernism
- The Postmodern and the Utopian
- Notes
- II. Some Theoretical Deliberations About Genre
- Genre as a Social Institution
- Notes
- III. The Classical Model of Historical Fiction
- The Emergence of the Historical Novel
- The Framing of the Waverley Novels
- The Didactic Function of the Historical Novel
- Imitation and Emulation
- The Demise of Scott
- Notes
- IV. Modernist Experiments With the Historical Novel
- A Twentieth-Century Perspective on Scott's Shallowness
- Historicism Criticized
- Historical Fiction and the Questioning of Objective Historical Knowledge
- Modernist Innovations of the Historical Novel
- The Subjectivization of History
- The Transcendence of History
- Sef-Reflexivity
- Historical Fiction and the Detective Novel
- Notes
- V. Fiction Historical and Scientific
- Science Fiction and the Utopian Mode
- Utopian Historical Fiction and Nostalgic Science Fiction
- Time-Travelling
- Uchronian Fiction
- The Parodic Nature of Counterfactual Conjecture
- The Political Implications of Uchronian Fiction
- Modernist Self-Reflexivity Versus Postmodernist Counterfactual Parody
- Notes
- VI. Self-Reflexivity in Postmodernist Historical Fiction
- The Conventionalization of Self-Reflexivity
- Historiography in the Making
- The Partiality of Historical Knowledge
- The Unreliability of the Sources
- Selectivity
- Narrativity
- Enclaves of Authenticity
- History in the Making
- Esthetic History
- Political History
- Toward Counterfactual Conjecture
- Notes
- VII. Alternate Histories
- Eclecticism
- Negational Counterfactual Conjecture
- Uchronian Fantasies
- History Turned Upside Down
- Counterfactual Shifts
- Closure
- Parody
- Coda: "Gravity's Rainbow
- Notes
- Conclusion
- References
- INDEX
