Telling Histories: Narrativizing History, Historicizing Literature

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Susana Onega Jaén
Rodopi, 1995 - 208 páginas
The proliferation of historical novels with more or less overt metafictional traits in the late seventies and eighties in Britain is a particularly arresting phenomenon at a time when historians are openly questioning the validity of the traditional concept of history understood as a scientific search for knowledge. This apparent contradiction justifies the attempt made by the contributors of this volume to analize the relationship between history and literature in English. The reader will find four preliminary essays on The End of the Classical Period establishing the characteristics of the appropriation of history since the appearance of Sir Walter Scott's historical romances with special emphasis on the Victorian novel (Dickens, Eliot, Mrs Humphry Ward), the Irish ballad and Post-Independence Indian historical fiction, as a necessary preface to the main group of essays on The Postmodernist Era devoted to establishing the common as well as the individually distinctive traits in the writings of some of the most accomplished contemporary writers in English: the more centered British novelists Margaret Drabble, Julian Barnes and William Golding as well as the more ex-centric Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson plus the playwright Caryl Churchill, and the black American novelist David Bradley.

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Índice

Foreword
5
ANDREW SANDERS
21
MARÍA DOLORES HERRERO
31
MARÍA PILAR PULIDO
49
FELICITY HAND
61
MARITA NADAL
85
CHANTAL CORNUTGENTILLE
103
MARÍA LOZANO
117
SUSANA ONEGA
135
ÁNGELES DE LA CONCHA
149
CELESTINO DELEYTO
163
JESÚS BENITO
181
Bibliography and Film References
193
Index
203
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Página 45 - I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
Página 95 - Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power, Which wedding Nature to us gives in dower A new Earth and new Heaven...
Página 29 - It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.
Página 179 - To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself inasmuch as she is on the side of the 'perceptible,' of 'matter' - to 'ideas,' in particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make 'visible...
Página 29 - I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.
Página 27 - Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Página 14 - I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
Página 74 - in general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences.
Página 121 - ... the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked 'other'.
Página 26 - ... questioning the stars or the sages, or his own soul, for that hidden knowledge which would break through the barrier of man's brief life, and show its dark path, that seemed to bend no whither, to be an arc in an immeasurable circle of light and glory.

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