The Rise of Pseudo-historical Fiction


Book Description

Fray Antonio de Guevara (1482-1545), the most prolific writer of pseudo-historical prose in sixteenth-century Spain, was named official chronicler by Emperor Charles V in 1526. Despite his title, Guevara never wrote a conventional history. A master of fictional semblance, Guevara self-fashioned his own literary personae or masks - among them those of friar, bishop, chronicler, courtier, imperial counselor, and court buffoon. In his pseudo-historical prose, Guevara resoundingly uses the voices of both the novelist and the court buffoon, entertaining the reader with humor, wit, satire, and irony. Artistically manipulating both classical and contemporary history, Guevara innovatively creates a vast and labyrinthine web in which history and fiction form an inseparable hybrid: a pseudo-historical narrative that heralds the essay and the modern novel.




Edge of Eternity


Book Description

Ken Follett's extraordinary historical epic, the Century Trilogy, reaches its sweeping, passionate conclusion. In Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, Ken Follett followed the fortunes of five international families—American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh—as they made their way through the twentieth century. Now they come to one of the most tumultuous eras of all: the 1960s through the 1980s, from civil rights, assassinations, mass political movements, and Vietnam to the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis, presidential impeachment, revolution—and rock and roll. East German teacher Rebecca Hoffmann discovers she’s been spied on by the Stasi for years and commits an impulsive act that will affect her family for the rest of their lives. . . . George Jakes, the child of a mixed-race couple, bypasses a corporate law career to join Robert F. Kennedy's Justice Department and finds himself in the middle of not only the seminal events of the civil rights battle but a much more personal battle of his own. . . . Cameron Dewar, the grandson of a senator, jumps at the chance to do some official and unofficial espionage for a cause he believes in, only to discover that the world is a much more dangerous place than he'd imagined. . . . Dimka Dvorkin, a young aide to Nikita Khrushchev, becomes an agent both for good and for ill as the United States and the Soviet Union race to the brink of nuclear war, while his twin sister, Tanya, carves out a role that will take her from Moscow to Cuba to Prague to Warsaw—and into history.




A History of the Spanish Novel


Book Description

The origins of the Spanish novel date back to the early picaresque novels and Don Quixote, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the history of the genre in Spain presents the reader with such iconic works as Galdós's Fortunata and Jacinta, Clarín's La Regenta, or Unamuno's Mist. A History of the Spanish Novel traces the developments of Spanish prose fiction in order to offer a comprehensive and detailed account of this important literary tradition. It opens with an introductory chapter that examines the evolution of the novel in Spain, with particular attention to the rise and emergence of the novel as a genre, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the bearing of Golden-Age fiction in later novelists of all periods. The introduction contextualises the Spanish novel in the circumstances and milestones of Spain's history, and in the wider setting of European literature. The volume is comprised of chapters presented diachronically, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century and others concerned with specific traditions (the chivalric romance, the picaresque, the modernist novel, the avant-gardist novel) and with some of the most salient authors (Cervantes, Zayas, Galdós, and Baroja). A History of the Spanish Novel takes the reader across the centuries to reveal the captivating life of the Spanish novel tradition, in all its splendour, and its phenomenal contribution to Western literature.




Invented Knowledge


Book Description

Were the Chinese the first to discover America in 1421? Did Jesus and Mary Magdalene have children together? Did extraterrestrials visit the earth during prehistory and teach humans how to build pyramids and stone structures? These are only a few of the controversial and intriguing questions that Ronald H. Fritze investigates in Invented Knowledge. This incredible exploration of the murky world of pseudo-history reveals the proven fact, the informed speculation, and the pure fiction behind lost continents, ancient super-civilizations, and conspiratorial cover-ups—as well as the revisionist historical foundations behind religions such as the Nation of Islam and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Drawing on the best scholarship available, Fritze shows that in spite of strong, mainstream historical evidence to the contrary, many of these ideas have proved durable and gained widespread acceptance. As the examples in Invented Knowledge reveal, pseudo-historians capitalize on and exploit anomalies in evidence to support their claims, rather than examining the preponderance of research as a whole. From Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to 10,000 B.C., the sensationalist topics of pseudo-history captivate audiences and permeate popular culture. Invented Knowledge offers many entertaining and enthralling examples of spurious narratives, artificial chronologies, and ersatz theories in a book guaranteed to intrigue, open eyes, and spark conversation among readers—skeptics and believers alike.




Renaissance Historical Fiction


Book Description

In this book, Alex Davis argues that the paradigms that have governed our ideas about the historical consciousness of the English Renaissance for more than half a century must be re-evaluated in the light shed by the Renaissance historical fictions of Philip Sidney, Thomas Deloney, and Thomas Nashe.




Writing History as a Prophet


Book Description

This is a postmodernist history of the historical novel with special attention to the political implications of the postmodernist attitude toward the past. Beginning with the poetics of Sir Walter Scott, Wesseling moves via a global survey of 19th century historical fiction to modernist innovations in the genre. Noting how the self-reflexive strategy enables a novelist to represent an episode from the past alongside the process of gathering and formulating historical knowledge, the author discusses the elaboration of this strategy, introduced by novelists such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, in the work of, among others, Julian Barnes, Jay Cantor, Robert Coover and Graham Swift. Wesseling also shows how postmodernist writers attempt to envisage alternative sequences for historical events. Deliberately distorting historical facts, authors of such uchronian fiction, like Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael R. Read, Salman Rushdie and Gunter Grass, imagine what history looks like from the perspective of the losers, rather than the winners.




Becoming International


Book Description

The first global intellectual history of the rise and spread of the modern international system. Providing a new understanding of that system and its contemporary functions, this book will be of interest to advanced students and scholars of international relations, international law, intellectual and global history, and historical sociology.




A Historian in Exile


Book Description

In A Historian in Exile, Jeremy Cohen shows how Solomon ibn Verga's Shevet Yehudah bridges the divide between the medieval and early modern periods, reflecting a contemporary consciousness that a new order had begun to replace the old.




The Forms of Historical Fiction


Book Description

No detailed description available for "The Forms of Historical Fiction".




The Alexander Romance


Book Description

The Alexander Romance is a difficult text to define and to assess justly. From its earliest days it was an open text, which was adapted into a variety of cultures with meanings that themselves vary, and yet seem to carry a strong undercurrent of homogeneity: Alexander is the hero who cannot become a god, and who encapsulates the desires and strivings of the host cultures. The papers assembled in this volume, which were originally presented at a conference at the University of Wroc?aw, Poland, in October 2015, all face the challenge of defining the Alexander Romance. Some focus on quite specific topics while others address more overarching themes. They form a cohesive set of approaches to the delicate positioning of the text between history and literature. From its earliest elements in Hellenistic Egypt, to its latest reworkings in the Byzantine and Islamic Middle East, the Alexander Romance shows itself to be a work that steadily engages with such questions as kingship, the limits of human (and Greek) nature, and the purpose of history. The Romance began as a history, but only by becoming literature could it achieve such a deep penetration of east and west.