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Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist innovations of the historical novel
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Wesseling as mentioned in this paper presents a post-modernist history of the historical novel with special attention to the political implications of the postmodernist attitude toward the past. But the focus of this work is not on the present, but on the future.Abstract:
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.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans
TL;DR: A detailed study of the genesis, composition, and long-term reception of Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian (1982 (1818) is presented in this paper.
Dissertation
Croyances religieuses et destinées individuelles dans le roman historique traitant de l'Antiquité : (XIXe & XXe siècles)
TL;DR: This paper present a demarche litteraire comparatiste, axee sur dix romans rattaches, en theorie, au genre historique, and traitant tous de l’Antiquite.
Book
Postcolonial Departures: Narrative Transformations in Australian and South African Fictions
TL;DR: In this article, a comparative reading of selected contemporary fictions from Australia and South Africa is presented, focusing on three genres: the Bildungsroman, the historical novel, and the pastoral to consider how these have been reproduced, adapted and transformed in these literatures in the recent past.
MonographDOI
History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction
TL;DR: Mitchell as discussed by the authors investigates the way neo-Victorian novels conceptualise our relationship to the Victorian past, and analyzes their role in the production and communication of historical knowledge, and explores their use of the Victorians' own vocabularies of history, memory and loss to re-member the nineteenth century today.