This is a postmodernist history of the historical vel 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 invations in the genre. Noting how the self-reflexive strategy enables a velist to represent an episode from the past alongside the process of gathering and formulating historical kwledge, the author discusses the elaboration of this strategy, introduced by velists 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.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Benjamins (John) North America Inc.,US, John Benjamins Publishing Co
ISBN-10
1556194250
ISBN-13
9781556194252
eBay Product ID (ePID)
189540707
Product Key Features
Author
Elisabeth Wesseling
Format
Hardback
Language
English
Topic
Literary Criticism
Additional Product Features
Issn
0167-8175
Series Part/Volume Number
26
Series Title
Utrecht Publications in General & Comparative Literature