This dissertation is an exploration of relationships between fiction and history as illuminated by historiographic fiction in general and the historiographic novel in particular. Here the term historiography is employed particularly in several of its many meanings: as the study of the materials and techniques of history, the study of what it means to be a historian, and the study of the philosophy of history. All of these are comprehended in the larger definition of issues pertaining to the writing of history. Four twentieth-century novels are presented and analyzed as historiographic novels. The common element in analysis of all the novels is the examination of historiographic material encoded in narrative, plot, characters, theme, structure or style. Each analysis focuses on one historiographic assumption or problem and brings in perspectives of historians or theorists of history as well as non-novelistic, critical perspectives of the authors themselves. E. M. Forster's Howards End (1910) is analyzed as an imaginative exposé of causality in historical thinking. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946) is presented as a gloss on Isaiah Berlin's critique of Leo Tolstoy's second epilogue to War and Peace. Several essays by philosopher Eric Voegelin provide the theoretical framework for a historiographic analysis of Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978). The historiographic reading of Graham Swift's Waterland (1983) turns on the convergence of tensions between natural and human history with conflicting ideas of what constitutes revolution. In the process of these analyses, the study establishes general properties of the historiographic novel, as opposed to related categories (historical novel, nonfiction novel, and historiographic metafiction, for example). The isolation, description, and examination of historiographic novels as a category of history is offered as a contribution to the debate about the relationships, respectively, between narrative and objectivity, and experience and representation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc5508 |
| Date | 12 1900 |
| Creators | Detels, Polly Elizabeth |
| Contributors | Pickens, Donald K., Painter, William E., Campbell, Randolph B., 1940-, Eaton, Henry L., Kamman, William, Mitchell, Giles |
| Publisher | University of North Texas |
| Source Sets | University of North Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | Text |
| Rights | Use restricted to UNT Community (strictly enforced), Copyright, Detels, Polly Elizabeth, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. |
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