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This article delves into two French novels written by Moroccan writers, Une enfance metissee by Abdallah Alaoui and Le fond de la jarre by Abdellatif Laabi. The authors, whose novels [...]

If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world. --Misattributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein (Crafts, Schneirla, and Robinson 396) Few [...]

Published posthumously in 1967 in the form of seven chapters and seventy pages, the fragment known as Slattery's Sago Saga (hereafter Saga ) is an effort to recast painful historical [...]

The Badger Riot by J.A. Ricketts. Flanker Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-89731732-7 The Flannigans by M.T. Dohaney. Flanker Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-1-89731706-8 1892 by Paul Butler. Flanker Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-897317-28-0 [...]

ABSTRACT The enquiry into the unexplained disappearance in 1938 of the Sicilian physicist Ettore Majorana takes the form of an inchiesta, a quasi-historical genre devised by Leonardo Sciascia, whose nature [...]

In her memoir, Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf tells an anecdote in which Lytton Strachey, one day in 1908, pointed to a stain on Vanessa Bell's dress and asked, 'Semen?' [...]

This article takes as its point of departure the historically controverted detail of the makeup that Napoleon iii was said to have worn on the battlefieds of Sedan. Tracing the origin of the Emperor's rouge to Victor Hugo's Les Chatiments (1853), it explores the intertextual connections that tie Zola's La Debacle (1892) to Hugo's historical writings on Napoleon iii and the Second Empire (Les Chatiments, Napoleon le Petit, Histoire d'un crime). Reading the cosmetic detail and its figural associations within the discursive context of Hugo's writings, I argue that Zola draws on and recontextualizes Hugolian motifs of theatricality, histrionics, blood, corruption, contamination, and expiation with a view to humanizing, in the context of the defeat at Sedan, the vilified Hugolian figure of the Emperor. Like a palimpsest, the makeup reveals Zola's debt to a body of texts that lie at the foundation of the Rougon-Macquart's historical poetics. (In French), En 1892, Zola publie La Debacle, l'avant-dernier roman de la serie des Rougon-Macquart, qui depeint la guerre franco-prussienne et la fin violente du Second Empire. Vingt ans apres les evenements [...]

A first person narrative by James D. Houston of the discovery of California's history through the voice of Patty Reed, a central feature of his novel, Snow Mountain Passage, is presented. It reveals how the management of voice, or the one who tells the story, can enhance and amplify a narrative and still be true to the historical record.

In this study, I examine the crucial role of historical research in Mori Ogai's historical fiction and biographies in the 1910s. I focus on Ogai's unique use of annotations and commentaries in works such as 'Oshio Heihachiro' (1914) and 'Tsuge Shirozaemon' (1915). While the annotation reveals visible traces of a new, disciplined mode of historical research introduced in the Meiji period, the flexibility of its format threatens to loosen the narrative structure. Ogai's use of annotation paved the way for his stylistic innovation of shiden, a potent form of historical biography that combines the literary, the historical, and the personal in a single narrative.

One: The Ivory Tower The field of English studies has become used to celebrating, for more than a decade, the importance of border-lines and in-between conditions. 'A contingent, borderline experience [...]

Traditional historiography has tended to focus on the history of 'Great Men,' while the lives of the general population, especially women, have often been excluded in historical narratives. This was [...]

THE AMERICAN COMES TO AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE as a patient novice, with an untrained, yet willing eye. Looking to achieve a definition of Australian literature, the American reader exchanges didacticism and [...]

The author examines Maria Edgeworth's novel 'Ennui' as a response to Ireland's Rebellion of 1798, one that was intended to disrupt the polarization that characterized political discourse of that era. Its plot format and thematics work to undermine authoritative judgment as both a subject and as a category for contemporary criticism.

The new prominence of alternate history in Western popular culture has increasingly prompted scholars to historicize it as a broader phenomenon. What has largely escaped notice until now, however, has been the question of the underlying function of alternate history as a genre of speculative narrative representation. In this essay, I argue that writers and scholars have long produced 'allohistorical narratives' out of fundamentally presentist motives. Allohistorical tales have assumed different typological forms depending upon how their authors have viewed the present. Nightmare scenarios, for example, have depicted the alternate past as worse than the real historical record in order to vindicate the present, while fantasy scenarios have portrayed the alternate past as superior to the real historical record in order to express dissatisfaction with the present. The presentist character of alternate histories allows them to shed light upon the evolving place of various historical events in the collective memory of a given society. In this essay, I examine American alternate histories of three popular themes--the Nazis winning World War II, the South winning the Civil War, and the American Revolution failing to occur--in order to show how present-day concerns have influenced how these events have been remembered. In the process, I hope to demonstrate that alternate histories lend themselves quite well to being studied as documents of memory. By examining accounts of what never happened, we can better understand the memory of what did.

'Literary history' is a cross between conventional (scientific) history and pure fiction. The resulting hybrid provides access to history that the more conventional sort does not (in particular, a sense of the experiences of the historical actors, and the human meaning of historical events). This claim is demonstrated by an analysis of two novels about World War II, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, and Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener. These two very different novels in English are by writers themselves very different from each other, writers from different times, different social and political backgrounds, and different points of view. Their novels examine the effects of the Second World War and the events of 1942 on the human psyche, and suggest how human beings have always searched for the silver lining despite the devastation and devaluation of values. Both novels resist any kind of preaching, and yet the search for peace, balance, and kindness is constantly highlighted. The facts of scientific history are woven into the loom of their unconventional histories. The sense of infirmity created by the formal barriers of traditional history is eased, and new possibilities for historical understanding are unveiled.

This article discusses the manner in which space, history and capitalism are portrayed in 'A Journal of the Plague Year' and 'Memoirs of a Cavalier.' Topics include war, narrative, time span, and collective experience.

In her Pulitzer Prize winning novel 'Lamb in His Bosom,' Caroline Miller focuses on the history of a middle class pioneer woman in Georgia and avoids the historical stereotype of white Southerners as being either downtrodden poor or wealthy slave-owners. Her strong female protagonist, Cean Carver also breaks stereotypes of Southern women.

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Walter Benjamin (258) With the publication of Paradise in 1998, Toni Morrison completed [...]

Paul Finkelman responds to Howard Jones' essay describing the origin of the myth that Joseph Cinque, a character in 'Amistad,' became a slave trader upon his own freedom from slavery.

This article discusses the origin of the story that Joseph Cinque, a former slave in 'Amistad', later became a slave trader. Topics include William A. Owens, historical fiction, and accuracy.

Fifty years after its original publication, Random House is rereleasing 'Power Without Glory,' an influential historical novel of Australia. Four critics debate about its merits and whether it was worthy of rereleasing.

Despite shrinkage in print runs and readership, canonical Literature during the 1990s developed along three major lines that connected writers of various generations in both aesthetics and philosophy: realism, exemplified in Georgii Vladimov's prize-winning novel, The General and His Army (1994); postmodernism, richly represented in the fiction of Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin, and Vladimir Sharov; and neosentimentalism, as derived from the naturalism of early perestroika, most consistently embraced by Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Liudmila UIitskaia, and, in his paternal profession de foi, one of Russia's chief theorists of postmodernism, Mikhail Epshtein. All three tendencies aspired to the status of mainstream, which they failed to attain, owing to a fundamental instability that chaos theory has labeled a 'bifurcation cascade.' Inasmuch as that stage, according to specialists in chaos theory, leads to irreversible changes that effect a high level of stability, the outlook for Russian literature at century's end might be less bleak than prophesied by doomsayers.

O History, as Carl Becker remarked, how many truths are committed in thy name! But there is no cynicism in this observation as long as it means that the course [...]

A critical analysis of African American author Arna Bontemps' novel 'Black Thunder' is provided. The author, focusing on the historical accuracy of the novel about slavery, maintains it can be read like an historical document in which Bontemps remains faithful to the atmosphere of the times.

Historical novels by the 19th-century Guatemalan author Jose Milla are discussed, with a focus on the themes of colonialism, inheritance and succession. The novels can be regarded as responses to the political crisis in Guatemala at the time they were written, although they are set in colonial times.

Atwood is reportedly both a gifted historian and a novelist. Her works are characterized by the relationship among fiction, history, memory, time and writing. In addition, they are characterized by descriptive and defining features and a number of influences.

Atwood's views on writing historical fiction raises a number of concerns about the relationship among fiction, history, memory, time and writing. These concerns correlate with similarities and differences between history and fiction, and the problem of individual identity of time.

Atwood's views on writing historical fiction arguably correlates with historians' efforts to write about history. Writing history and writing about fiction can be both associated with the relationship among fiction, history, memory, time and writing.