In FAMOUS MEN WHO NEVER LIVED, unwilling refugees from an alternate universe find their place in our New York City, making peace with what they have lost.

A Kingdom Jack’d is a satirical verse-play based on William Shakespeare’s Henry IV dramas. It opens in 1399 England, following the deposal of Richard II and what should have been the coronation of Henry IV. Instead, political machinations have thrust the clownish rogue John “Jack” Falstaff to the throne. With his band of cutthroats running court and the Lancasters reduced to mere rebels, Britain descends into chaos. The country’s only hope lies with Shakespeare’s literary creation Doll Tearsheet and his other peripheral, disempowered female characters. At play’s end, peace is gained with Falstaff’s flight into exile and the dismantling of patriarchal order.

This study examines the expression and patterns of alternate history in nineteenth-century Britain and France. “Alternate history” refers to the presentation of events that did not happen in order to consider historical trajectories that might have been and the consequent displacements of present and future. The central chapters of this thesis correspond to the three fields of writing in which these texts are clustered: in narratives of undefeated and resurgent Napoleons, which I trace from the rival journalistic claims made about Napoleon and his historical significance; in accounts that re-imagine the transition from antiquity to modernity, for example by delaying the passage of Christianity from the Middle East to western Europe; and, as part of the plurality-of-worlds debate, in the popular-astronomical imagination of variant versions of human history upon other planets. Three patterns of alternate history are discernible: the romantic-utopian, the critical-reflexive and the linear-chronological. I attach to these patterns the figures of the garden, the map and the dial. These models do not correspond to the three temporal fields of the recent, antique and planetary past, and there is not a straightforward development of these patterns or modes across the nineteenth century; they rather represent a spectrum of purposes for the fictional alteration of the past which occur at various moments and contexts in the century. Alternate history in this period has never been the subject of in-depth analysis. The approach of this study will not absorb such transformations of history into a tradition of futurist writing, as some critics have done. Maintaining alternate history’s distinctness from futurism makes it possible to avoid framing the texts as precursors to science fiction’s historical anticipations. This study will argue that alternate history should instead be recognised as a category of writing that is aware of and concerned with the way that history is written and received, in particular with history’s interactions with other literary forms and the relationships between writing history and other disciplinary fields. More broadly, alternate history should be interpreted in the context of the often described formation of History as a positivist discipline by the late nineteenth century; but far from indicating a steady progression toward scientific historiography, alternate-historical texts reflect upon that transformation and its consequences in other literary fields (journalism, political theory, popular Astronomy, the romance novel) in the century whose “great obsession” is said to have been history.

The Fantastic Machine - the story of a man who struggles to keep family & friends safe when evil visits 1905 Portland, Oregon.

A fictional novel utilizing third person limited narration from the perspective of the primary character, Ilya Kollide, who narrates the story as though it were happening in his head as it occurred, with frequent embellishments. He has come to live near an old mansion on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, named Neimasaurus, to find an antiquated, dusty world of faded aristocracy. Temporarily orphaned at the age sixteen by the recent death of his parents, he has traveled four thousand miles to live with his last living relative, an uncle named Demetri, whom he has never met. The year is 1990, only this is not a world where the rule of the Tsar was supplanted by the Soviet Union. Instead, it is a logical exploration of what Russia might resemble, had communism never taken root. While the fantastical may or may not occur, depending upon how the reader chooses to interpret the point of view of the narrator, the setting in and of itself is not meant to be fantastical. Ilya discovers that all the servants who work there are deaf, as is his uncle and his own now deceased parents, whom he carries around in an urn after mixing their ashes together. While working at the great estate of the Neimasaurus family, Ilya discovers a surprising numbers of stories and people who both parallel his own experiences and serve as allegorical warnings toward his future mistakes in life. He becomes obsessed with the idea that he is to blame for his parents’ death and sets out on a quest to bring redemption to the wounded inhabitants of the estate, only to discover that not everyone wants to be helped. In fact, they want him dead. They see him as an allegory, just as he sees them. To the young man Shoji Yamano, iii Ilya represents everything he was, and can no longer be. As such a reflection, he resolves to shatter Ilya like a mirror. The novel charts Ilya’s personal growth from a neurotic wreck, incapable of normal interaction with people, to a young man capable of not just self-sacrifice, but an understanding of what it actually means to literally sacrifice himself for the well-being of someone he barely knows. He learns to value time spent with others rather than dwelling within a narcissistic and lonely fantasy world.

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Zeit/Geschichte: Amerikanische Alternate Histories nach 9/11 untersucht die Entwicklung kontrafaktischer Geschichtstexte, sogenannter alternate histories, vor dem Hintergrund des öffentlichen Diskurses in den USA nach dem 11. September 2001. Dabei konzentriert sich die Studie auf die formalen und generischen Eigenschaften neuerer „Mainstream-alternate histories“ seit den Terroranschlägen. Obwohl keiner der drei untersuchten Texte – Philip Roths The Plot Against America, Michael Chabons The Yiddish Policemen's Union sowie Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds – von den 9/11-Anschlägen handelt, geben doch alle drei Einblicke in die Beziehungen zwischen dem 9/11-Diskurs und jüngeren Entwicklungen im literarischen bzw. kulturellen Feld. Dabei erweist sich alternate history als ein Genre, das mit seiner thematischen, strukturellen und medialen Variabilität ermöglicht, 9/11-spezifische Veränderungen darzustellen und gleichzeitig den 9/11-Diskurs selbst zu beeinflussen. Die vorliegende Studie zeigt auf, wie sich die untersuchten Texte aktiv in den 9/11-Diskurs einschreiben, um nicht nur zeitgenössische Erfahrungen, Entwicklungen und Empfindungen, sondern auch Fragen nach Geschichte und Vergangenheitsdarstellungen zu beantworten.