"The Prophetic Voice In Garro, Morante, and Allende"

La movilidad de las fronteras entre la historia y la ficción ha sido un viejo problema para la historiografía, que desde muy antiguo incorporó leyendas panegíricas, profecías y experiencias ficticias, articuladas con la tradición del saber, la revisión de las fuentes a la luz de la crítica y la cultura política de la época. Del mismo modo, el presente y el pasado adquieren una relación ambigua y conflictiva para los historiadores, conscientes en muchas ocasiones de las limitaciones de su oficio. Desde dichas premisas, esta intervención pretende analizar la práctica histórica y literaria de la Ilustración en España; en un momento de amplio debate sobre el patriotismo, la dialéctica entre barbarie y civilización y la masculinidad. Estas polémicas atraparon la memoria cultural del rey Pedro I de Castilla (1334-1369) –personaje discutido y negociado, absolutamente problemático en relación a los valores culturales del XVIII– cuya recreación se enmarcó en las necesidades de aquel presente distante. Analizar los compendios históricos de la época, la prensa, las crónicas y las apologías del rey permiten reflexionar sobre los desacuerdos que tuvieron lugar en la configuración de una práctica histórica siempre producto de sus circunstancias y contextos. Las fuentes permiten, además, discutir la idea de distancia histórica y diálogar con una noción del pasado que, de la mano de los historiadores, literatos y periodistas, pasó a jugar un papel político en la sociedad de finales del Antiguo Régimen. Desde posiciones absolutamente plurales y discrepantes, la figura del rey otorgó significado a la sociedad que lo producía y funcionó como refuerzo de los estereotipos que sobre España y la Edad Media se estaban construyendo desde otros ámbitos de la cultura.

Rethinking History, 2011

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.

This essay considers the nature of historical discourse through a consideration of the historical narrative of Lucan's Pharsalia. The focus is on the manner in which Lucan depicts history as capable of being fictionalised, especially through the operation of political power. The discourses of history make a historical account, but those discourses are not, in Lucan's view, true, but are fictionalised. The key study comes from Caesar at Troy, when Lucan explores the idea of a site (and history) which cannot be understood, but which nevertheless can be employed in a representation of the past. yet, Lucan also alludes to a 'true history', which is unrepresentable in his account of Pharsalus, and beyond the scope of the human mind. Lucan's true history can be read against Benjamin and Tacitus. Lucan offers a framework of history that has the potential to be post-Roman (in that it envisages a world in which there is no Rome), and one in which escapes the frames of cultural memory, both in its fictionalisation and in the dependence of Roman imperial memory on cultural trauma.

Transnational Literature, 2012

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.

New Literary History, 2019

G iven its brevity, the novella has been newly rediscovered as "the original #Longread," 1 an appellation that fits neatly into its centuries-long genealogy. Before there were hashtags, the novella has been described as many things: an anecdote retold, the sister of drama, a short novel, a story readable in a single sitting, an unprecedented incident, or simply as a piece of news. Curiously, these alternative titles point to no common feature, except one: novellas seem to be defined with respect to other genres. This is perhaps most true of the rapprochement of the novella and the short novel, which has proven so intuitive that its comparative nature is often forgotten and "novella" used interchangeably with "short novel." On the contrary, a novella and a novel, however long or short, are very different things.

The Encyclopedia of the Novel , 2011

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.