A Case for the New Historical Novel (Dissertation)
Alan Sargeant1993, A Case For The New Historical Novel
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
Featuring Toni Morrison's Beloved and Myself and Marco Polo by Paul Griffiths. The following dissertation proposes the emergence of a new genre in the mid-1980s period: the New Historical novel; as uniquely defined within the broad panorama of Post Modernist Literature as Magic Realism and Metafiction. I would also like to propose that its emergence and popularity is a manifestation of a crisis within the notion of genre itself and can be viewed against the wider anxieties of modern culture. Each of the novels looked at address issues relating to Foucault’s concept of the ‘heterotopia’ and the processes by which reality is constructed socially and history is produced. I have focused on two novels: Myself and Marco Polo (1989) and Beloved (1987).
Related papers
The emergence of a meta-genre: The historical novel and the modernization of the novel
PRIMERJALNA KNJIZEVNOST, 2007
The aim of the article is to situate the historical novel within the history of the novel. It is argued that the great pioneers of the historical novel in the 19th century are pivotal within a tendency that could be called "the modernization of the novel". The 19thcentury historical novels confirm the modernization tendency both on a semantic level and on a compositional level. They pay attention to the contingencies of everyday life as well as to the "openended" dialogical nature of the fictional world.
Historical Fiction: Experiencing the Past, Reflecting History
Fictionality in Global Contexts, 2014
Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Use of Postmodernist Practices in Contemporary American Fiction
“The whole is the false”, declared Adorno in an inversion of Hegel’s maxim that the whole was the true (Minima Moralia 50). Adorno’s statement symbolises perfectly post-structural preoccupations in rejecting the practices of structuralism. It also encompasses Postmodernism, as a post-structuralist theory, response to the absolute and utopian visions of Modernism in the cultural milieu. While Modernism privileged grand narratives that conceived a unified theory to account for historical problems and necessities, Postmodernism denied this theoretical unity by exploring its many contradictions. In his analysis of the grand narratives, Adorno states that “[t]he totality of the universal [theory] expresses its own failure”, in a reference to the all-embracing explanations and attitudes imposed by these narratives (Negative Dialectics 317). In the context of the American literary landscape, after World War II, fiction became more and more concerned with its own making. Thus, postmodern practices became the ideal tools to intertwine political, social, and cultural meanings reflecting a multicultural emergence of literary perspective.
Introduction: History and Contemporary Literature
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
Chapter Four Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction ( s )
2015
The large body of critical work centred on modernism and postmodernism, which has seen the light of day in the twentieth century and the first years of the twentieth first, is simply impressive. What partly accounts for such extensive and ever proliferating critical responses to the two (cultural and aesthetic) movements may be connected, on one level at least, to the lack of consensus and the intense debate carried out among commentators with regard to their meaning and politics. As terms, modernism and postmodernism have infiltrated the professional idioms of a variety of disciplinary fields, from literature, art and philosophy to architecture, film and cultural analysis. They are, however, often interpreted multiply in their various contexts, decoded as they are in ways that address very specific, field-bound issues and problems. What is more, their definitional limits are further stretched by the ongoing revision to which they have been subjected since at least the 1970s, as new...
A Look Into The Historical Novel
2020
The historical novel— also referred to as ‘historical fiction’ in this paper— is a popular genre of literature and currently one of the rich areas for research within the fields of literature and literary criticism. Although historical novels are usually densely written and filled with factual details, they can effectively bring a historic period to life in engaging and memorable ways. Historical fiction has received so much attention over the years and it has been greatly discussed by scholars, yet one can hardly find a comprehensive definition for it that includes all the characteristics of the genre. This paper investigates the reasons behind this and analyzes some of the definitions of historical fiction in an attempt to form a working definition for the genre. It also studies whether research guarantees the success of a historical work of fiction or not. The paper also explains the purposes behind the production of historical fiction. Clearly, this genre has a long history in w...
The Anxiety of Authenticity: Writing Historical Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century
History Workshop Journal, 2008
The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel
2009
The twentieth-century English novel encompasses a vast body of work, and one of the most important and most widely read genres of literature. Balancing close readings of particular novels with a comprehensive survey of the last century of published fiction, this Companion introduces readers to more than a hundred major and minor novelists. It demonstrates continuities in novel-writing that bridge the century's pre-and postwar halves and presents leading critical ideas about English fiction's themes and forms. The essays examine the endurance of modernist style throughout the century, the role of nationality and the contested role of the English language in all its forms, and the relationships between realism and other fictional modes: fantasy, romance, science fiction. Students, scholars and readers will find this Companion an indispensable guide to the history of the English novel.
Related papers
Rethinking historical genres in the twenty-first century
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.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Rise of Historioplastic Metafiction
Metamodernism Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (eds. Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheus Vermeulen), 2017
One Theory's Underdog Is Another Theory's Treasure: The Novelistic Genre in Different Regimes of Relevance
Revista Transilvania, 2020
Historical fiction and fictions of history: review essay
Rethinking History, 2011
Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A New Stylistic Narrative Form
Toni Morrison faces a great challenge in representing the Atlantic slave trade. In contemporary narrative form, the novel, Beloved, portrays the devastating effects of forced transnational migration. She confronts conventional silences surrounding the aspect of slavery by presenting displaced Africans on their way to America. Her text defines both black literature of the late twentieth century and troubles the status quo as an experiment in aesthetic expression which demonstrates the legacy of trauma fabricated in American culture. She stylizes her narrative form of language for particular effect by using direct references and subtle allusions to the aspect of slavery. Drawing on the coded discourse of oral history and slave narrative as fashion of writerly texts, Morrison takes her readers as participants in the construction of cultural memory. The present article takes up the formalistic and cultural approach to critique the aesthetic means by which Morrison's verbal style signifies the content of her story, Beloved, which results in a new genre as African-American literature that establishes itself in the late twentieth and the present century world literature.
"Introduction: Worlding Realisms Now" special issue *Novel: A Forum on Fiction* (2016)
Realist fiction has been an object of fascinated suspicion since the late-nineteenth century: modernists, structuralists, poststructuralists, and Marxists are among those to have characterized the realist novel as aesthetically bland and/or ideologically reactionary. But realist fiction—in dialogue with the realisms of photography, film, television, and other media—has lived to tell another tale. Scholars in various fields have begun to hold that while realist narrative responds to capitalist permutations across space and time, it is—for that very reason—a transnational medium shot through with aesthetic possibility. The essays in this special issue reject the reflex to prejudge realist art and expand the category to include the realisms of late-Victorian theater, postcolonial fiction from African, Egyptian, and Indian milieus; and photojournalistic experiments wrought in response to revolution in Latin America. What is constant throughout is the certainty of realism’s aesthetic flexibility, historical variability, and irreducibility to any single genre, period, technique, or national project. Realist art is both constitutively worlded (in taking the material world for its premise) and worlding (in making new ways of seeing, knowing, thinking, and being palpable to those worlds). After providing a brief survey of realism’s critical reception and some postulates for future scholarship, this introduction lays out the arc of the special issue.
A New Reality, A New Genre of Literature (2017)
When seen from the perspective of soul, literature reveals itself as psyche’s other. By this I mean that psyche reflects its self-movement in literature. The intimate relationship between psyche and language has only been discovered around the 18th or 19th centuries when an explosion of interest in the phenomenon of language occurred. But this intimate relationship has always been so, although unrecognized as such, until consciousness was able to “perceive” language as a phenomenon, distinct from natural phenomena. … We are now in a time of a transformation in the configuration of consciousness-world and, correspondingly, new genres of literature are in the process of forming—genres that may one day reflect and articulate the psyche as newly re-configured…. With this catastrophic psychic transformation in mind, we must ask what genre of literature can express, articulate and manifest movement as is now privileged by the psyche so that new cultural practices may come into being and new contours of the world may be perceived. The first part of this essay concerns my efforts towards finding such a genre as I personally underwent the catastrophe of the collapse of opposites, and the second part addresses some very interesting and relevant work occurring throughout the literary world, which I believe is heading in the same direction as my own efforts.
The Encyclopedia of the Novel (History of the Novel)
The Encyclopedia of the Novel , 2011
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.