The Encyclopedia of the Novel (History of the Novel)

Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, 2015

The 'turn to history' over the last few decades has become a central preoccupation within contemporary cultural criticism, as is witnessed, for example, in the theoretical trend of 'New Historicism.' While the 'history turn' in the humanities has assumed an astounding variety of forms, the new prominence of history in contemporary literature is without doubt one of its most significant and intriguing manifestations. Indeed, historical poetry, drama and particularly fiction, comprising texts at least partly set in past periods, have become a defining feature of the literary scene in diverse regions of the world. Surveying developments in contemporary British fiction, for example, James English stresses the importance of "the putative Renaissance and refashioning of historical fiction in Britain since the 1970s" (11), thus highlighting the many transformations that fiction's most recent engagement with history has also brought. Indeed, the distinct historical focus in fiction produced at least since the late 1970s is only comparable to that in the classic, nineteenth-century historical novel. Even though formalist modernism's experimental engagement with history and temporality has recently been highlighted, not least by Hayden White, 1 it is the long realist novel that, as White paradigmatically argues, competes with historiography itself in the way it 'emplots' facts and events to render a 'truthful' sense of historical reality. However, contemporary literature may be said not to reproduce 'reality' but rather to reflect on the relation between reality, fiction and history, often alluding to the ways in which realism and modernism have implicitly represented and thus conceived this relation. In her influential study, A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), Linda Hutcheon privileges a new kind of historical fiction which she terms "historiographic metafiction," distinguished by formal selfreflexiveness while, paradoxically, laying claim to historical events and personages (5). Although Hutcheon acknowledges the modernist legacy of problematising

In the context of the freedoms inspired by postmodernism and enabled by the development of innovative textual and graphic platforms, new theories of history view genres as flexible living forms that inspire more creative and experimental representations of the past. Creative historical writing is thus challenging conventional genre categorization. New ways of articulating history compete with the traditional model of historical prose. Indeed, the twenty-first century has witnessed a proliferation of new forms of history, including film and documentaries, social media, graphic novels, video games and re-enactments, historical novels and biopics, as well as innovations in first-person narratives such as historical witness, synthetic memories, and travel writing. Acknowledging the current diversity in theories and practices, and assuming the historicity of historical genres, this introduction engages the reality of historical genres today and explores new directions in historical practice by examining these new forms of representing the past. Thus, without denying the validity of traditional and conventional forms of history (and arguing that these forms remain valid), this themed issue surveys the production of what might be considered new historical genres practised today, focusing in particular on experimental forms.

Dibur Literary Journal, 2016

THE ARCHIVE: LITERARY PERSPECTIVES ON THE INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN HISTORY AND FICTION — INTRODUCTION BY VERED KARTI SHEMTOV, MARIE-PIERRE ULLOA, ANAT WEISMAN.

2019

This paper explores the origins and theoretical response to the historical novel. It touches on the nineteenth century split between academic history and historical fiction, which promoted an artificial opposition between history and fiction, and discusses the lack of scholarly definitions of the genre. Issues surrounding the classifications that are available are examined, before a new definition is proposed.

Rethinking History, 2016

The relationship between history and fiction has long been recognised as close but problematic and there are few places in which the problematics of this relationship manifest more clearly than in the case of the historical novel. Concerned with the borderland space in which history meets fiction, this reading of the historical novel is accompanied by the reading of another borderline case, that of popular narrative history, in the expectation that the proximity of these two modes of writing will allow insight into the workings of both. Drawing on Gérard Genette’s Paratexts (1997), my interpretation of the relation between history and historical fiction turns on notions of hospitality, connecting Genette’s work with that of Jacques Derrida in order to outline a model of generic intersection in which historical fiction appears as the malign guest of historiography, for whom the hospitality of historical writing necessarily entails hostility at the threshold. More precisely, I will argue that it is this hostility (hostipitality) that guarantees the integrity of the threshold dividing history and fiction while at the same time calling into question the assumptions underlying the status of fiction as guest and history as host.

Koers

and On the Contrary (1993) in terms o f a response to the controversial influence o f postmodernism on the historical novel in South Africa today. Although the first o f these two novels, An A ct o f Terror, hints at the complexities o f representation in historiography and fiction, it ultimately chooses against a postmodernist view o f history, preferring to interpret and represent history in terms o f an over-arching metanarrative and a stable subject because it facilitates effective political action. The article then argues that the second o f these novels, On the Contrary, can be read as an affirmation o f the postmodernist view o f history, especially when seen as an example o f that variant o f postmodernist historical fiction called "uchronian fiction " (Wesseling, 1991). Because uchronian fiction (the result o f a cross-fertilization between historical fiction and science fiction) reconstructs the past in such as way as to propose possibilities fo r the transformation o f future societies, On the Contrary can also be read as a politically responsible novel, thus confirming the view that postmodernism has a political dimension.

Orbis Litterarum, 2015

The article explores the problematic assumptions underlying the traditional view that literature deals with the realm of the possible and history with the realm of the actual. This dichotomy risks dismissing how a sense of the possible constitutes an important dimension of every actual world, how literary fiction provides interpretations of actual worlds, and how it has its own literary means of giving us a sense of a past world as a space of possibilities. This argument is developed by analysing Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes (2006, The Kindly Ones), which has created a heated controversy on the contribution of literature to the understanding of the Holocaust. The article contributes to developing narrative hermeneutics as an approach which, first, suggests that both historiography and fiction are ways of interpreting the world past and present, and, second, is sensitive to how fiction requires specific modes of interpretation and engagement. The analysis of Littell's novel shows that the interplay between immersiveness and critical distance can produce a narrative dynamic that allows the reader to engage emotionally with an ethically problematic lifeworld without uncritically adopting the protagonist's perspective. One important way in which fiction can produce insights into history is its ability to cultivate, through its specifically fictional means, a sense of history as a sense of the possible while at the same time reflecting on the conditions and limits of narrating, representing and understanding history.

Modern Language Quarterly, 2021

One shared assumption of many recent efforts to delineate a history of fiction (or fictionality, typically understood as a mode of nonliteral reference) is that that term names a conceptual operation, be it intrinsic or culturally learned. This article argues that fiction is merely a particular type of classification, akin but not identical to the classifications performed by terms such as mimesis or verisimilitude. Thus it is nonsensical to claim that fiction qua concept does or does not exist at any given moment: fiction is foremost a way of grouping various literary practices, and it is those practices that emerge over time. The article then recasts the interest in the early novel's fictionality shown by Catherine Gallagher and others as a problem of practices rather than of concepts. It tracks trends in subject matter and assertions of literal truth through a quantitative diachronic analysis of 230 years of French novels. While these trends cannot by their very nature show the birth of the concept of fiction-which was never born in the first place-they are the type of evidence that should be central to any future history of fiction.