In this bachelor’s essay, I examine the importance of place in Marguerite Duras’ The Lover from 1984. By using an ecocritical approach I find that the concepts of “culture” and “nature”, or “human” and “environment”, are made undistinguished. I also find that colonialism is highly present, and the novel accords to the theories of the overlapping literary fields of ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Ecocritical postcolonialism maintains that non-white people have historically been likened to animals and thus have a similar relationship with colonisers as humans have with the non-human. In addition, I apply Michail Bachtin’s concept of the chronotope to the novel and conclude that the Mekong River, the Cholen district, the mother’s home, the desert, and France are the most significant chronotopes. They all represent time in some way – usually in the form of cultural history or the protagonist’s lifetime – and each one plays into the novel’s overarching views of colonialism and nature.

Uppsatsen ämnar utforska hur den postapokalyptiska genren brukar historia. Detta görs genom en läsning av Dimitrij Gluchovskijs Metro 2033 (2009), utifrån Espmarks syn på dialogicitet och Aronssons historiebruksteoretiska tankar, där historiskt meningsskapande med olika syften blir till genom berättelser i former som större narrativ, metaforer, metonymier och symboler.Bakhtins kronotop används också, men med Aronssons fokus på dess spatiala sida. Uppsatsen föreslår att figuren kan användas för att visa hur fiktionen kan skapa ett abstrakt rum istället för ett rent konkret eller fysiskt, och därmed få med de känslor och den världssyn som är intimt sammanlänkade med det fysiska rummet. I uppsatsen friläggs hur Metro 2033 återskapar en abstrakt version av det kalla krigets spelplan för att legitimera kärnvapenkrigsmotivet.Förslag ges också på en begreppsapparat för att tala om olika historiska nivåer i den postapokalyptiska fiktionen där vår samtids accepterade historia, förutom att den modifieras fiktivt, också får sällskap av spekulativ pre- och postapokalyptisk historia. Uppsatsen ger flera exempel på hur texten brukar historia, bland annat hur den spekulativa historien kan användas för att kommentera företeelser ur samtidens accepterade historia. Uppsatsen visar också att ett av textens huvudsakliga budskap, uppmaningen till mänskligheten att sluta konstruera och demonisera den andre, medvetet förstärks genom bruket av historia eftersom den historiska dimensionen ger kontinuitet till den framtida visionen. / The aim of this essay is to explore the using of history in post-apocalyptic fiction. This is accom-plished by reading and analyzing Dimitrii Glukhovskii’s Metro 2033. The theoretical basis for the reading is the dialogicity of Espmark and Aronsson’s theory of using of history. It posits that the production of meaning through history is made from narratives of different lengths and shape, such as metaphors, metonymies and symbols. The chronotope of Bakhtin is also applied, but with Aronssons focus on its spatial component. A suggestion is made to apply it in a way that shows how the fiction can refer to, or create, an ab-stract spatial location, rather than a physical, and thereby evoking the feelings and worldviews intimately associated with the location and its time. In the reading of the text this is shown by ar-guing that Glukhovskii recreates the cold war as an abstract chronotope to legitimize his nuclear apocalypse scenario. The essay presents suggestions for definitions of the historical levels in the genre. These are la-beled accepted history of the present, fictive rewriting of the same, and lastly pre- or post-apoca-lyptic speculative history, depending on whether the temporal interest lies prior to or after the im-agined apocalypse. The essay exemplifies a number of ways in which the text uses history, one of which is to use the speculative history to comment on the accepted history of the present. The essay also shows that the intent of the text, the plea to humanity to stop the process of othering, is enhanced by the use of history since the historical perspective offers a retrospective continuity that strengthens the future vision.

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It has always been important to study history. But what we can’t forget is that there’s more than one way of doing so. One of those is literature. In this thesis I will therefore study two contemporary historical novels: The Night Watch by Sarah Waters and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. The aim is to explore how they portray different kinds of historical experiences and how that may relate to questions that are relevant even in a contemporary context. Because both novels have an interestning relationship with time and space, I’m going to use the russian literary theorist Micheal Bachtins concept of the chronotope to explore how time and space operates and relate to eachother. In the end, this thesis also aims to show that literature can be a valuable object to study for those that are intererested in histiography.