(Download) "Print the Myth: Elena Poniatowska's Biographical Fiction (Estudios y Confluencias)" by Confluencia: Revista Hispanica de Cultura y Literatura # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Print the Myth: Elena Poniatowska's Biographical Fiction (Estudios y Confluencias)
- Author : Confluencia: Revista Hispanica de Cultura y Literatura
- Release Date : January 22, 2009
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,Reference,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 82 KB
Description
In his essay "Awakening From the Nightmare? Notes on the Historical Novel," the eminent critic and Victorian scholar Steven Marcus suggests a number of possible reasons for the enduring popularity of the genre since its inception (according to Marcus) in 1814 with the publication of Sir Walter Scott's Waverly. Marcus writes "some people read historical novels for the same reasons that they read serious history--to find constructions and representations ofhuman experience which render that experience coherent and meaningful within certain specified categories and terms" (165). This may be, in Marcus's estimation, the highest objective of the gente, given that its use may also be to "read historical novels instead of reading history ... to educate ... painlessly and to acquire information at cut rates." Nevertheless, there is an abiding value in the genre that is worth the attempt to comprehend. As Marcus notes in a paraphrase of the Marxist critic George Lukacs, serious readers of such works may also be "interested in those fictional and imaginative representations that bring the past to life as the prehistory of the present, as its necessary concrete precondition" (164). Concerns such as these--the impulse to invent an intimate historiography as an approach to comprehending the present--are considerably more complicated in the case of accounts involving actual historical figures. The "fictional biography" may be at least as old a device as Shakespeare's plays. In terms of the contemporary novel, it has become a significant trope of the new Postmodernism, with authors as varied as Philip Roth, Don Delillo, and Neal Stephenson engaging the form as a kind of speculative hyperrealism, where an actual historical underpinning or framework provides a structure for what are, quite often, stunning excursions into worlds that never existed outside of imagination. Somewhat ironically, these fictions may find their most direct forebear in the borderline pulp entertainment of George Macdonald Fraser's Flashman series, where a caddish protagonist lifted from a classic novel (Harry Flashman is a minor character in Toro Brown's Schooldays) is repeatedly placed in the middle of key world events. Such a device allows an access to commentary on any number of piquant issues--the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the personal peculiarities of Count Bismarck or Theodore Roosevelt--limited only by the novelist's interest in delineating the range of his narrative.
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