There are many ways in which Scott is weaving his critique into the novel. The historical documents, both fictional and actual, that Scott interweaves are framed with comments that challenge established assumptions. On the one hand he addresses the gaps – referred to as “question marks” in Benang (Cf. 27 and 36) – that exist in historical documentation, on the other hand he questions the credibility of the sources for the historical documents. At the same time Scott introduces imagination and fiction as potential equivalent sources for historical narratives. The plot in Benang with all the confrontations – especially between Harley and his grandfather – features the clash between the old way of understanding history (represented by the grandfather) …show more content…
Are there limits in what a novel can do and what it should not attempt to do? Miriam Wallraven states that fiction is fundamental for reconstructing history. (Cf. Wallraven 144) This does, however, not imply that fiction should be the only way to process the past. While some historians try to hold on to their supposedly unique feature of authenticity, many historians show a significant amount of self-reflexivity. Readers are invited to witness the process of writing history. (Cf. Neumann 23) This does, however, not imply that they have turned towards fiction, leaving historical documentation behind. On the contrary they enable the continuing existence of historical documentation. Contemporary societies depend on the processing of the past and on history, even if the evidence consists of subjective memories about past events, as Southgate puts it. (Cf. Southgate 73) It would not be sufficient to reduce history to fictional texts, leaving behind the aim to look back on and reappraise historical events. It should not be the aim of literature to nullify historians’ work of documenting the past, instead a revolutionization of their approaches should be pursued. It should be acknowledged that other forms of processing the past are also valid and in fact essential to documenting the nations past. According to Kate Darian-Smith it is not about dismissing history as an old fashioned concept, labelling it as irrelevant. Instead
Do we control the judgments and decisions that we make every day? In the book,
This argument is unusual because while most agree that there is a relation between the two subjects not many contend that they can be truly interdisciplinary in the way that biochemistry or other subjects are. New Historicism attempted to bridge the gap however only became important in the literary field. While, literary scholars see the value in history, historians less often see the ways in which literature can inform their studies. Kastan states that his book Shakespeare After Theory is genuinely interdisciplinary because he analyzes Shakespeare’s works through their production, material for, authorial intentions, and mediations. He addresses the plays not only as texts and objects but also as historical artifacts, paying attention to the ways they encountered the world. Therefore, not only does Kastan argue that literary studies and history can and should be interdisciplinary, but also asserts that his book manages to combine the two in a genuine
The modern novel, the serious novel, does tend toward either two extremes: either it is a tight metaphysical object, which wishes it were a poem, and which attempts to convey, often in mythical form, some central truth about the human condition or else it is a loose journalistic epic, documentary or possibly even didactic in inspiration, offering a commentary on current institutions or on some matter out of history (264).
Sorting through all the possible beliefs of an author may be problematic, and may also be a reason why many are exclusive readers to a certain author or specific genre. In both cases, the reader is able to extract some external information from knowledge of an author’s previous work or from other works that incorporate similar ideas. This is an effective way of deciding which beliefs the author wants to be adopted, by making relations between a present story and ones previously written. It may also be helpful to know the time and place the story was written. Sometimes present-day knowledge can contradict the content of stories written in the past. It is thus pertinent that one keeps the story’s context at the fore front of thought when trying to extract the underlying content.
The constant changing of technology and social norms makes difficult for different generations to understand one another and fully relate to each other. Diction and slang change as years pass and what is socially acceptable may have been prohibited in the previous generations.
Through the reading of background historical information and the novel of the same time period, one can see that literature is the reflection of the time period about which it was written. Historical data and fictitious characters are woven together to produce a realistic result.
Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle is a political statement piece that was written to show the conditions of immigrants workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sinclair, through weeks of extensive research, gathered enough information to form a story based on the evidence he had gathered. Although The Jungle is a work of fiction, Sinclair’s novel is still said to be a primary source due the the fact that it was based on research he was doing personally, it was written near the time it was set, and it contains many historical accuracies.
At first glance, Inhuman Traffick: The International Struggle against the Transatlantic Slave Trade bares resemblance to your typical, run of the mill historical textbook. The reader [looking at the cover,] may expect to see ordinary text that would pertain to a standardized African History course. Contrary to the title, the author, Rafe Blaufarb, provides a vivid, contextual look at how slavery spanned out with the use of graphic images and primary sources in a way most authors do not today. Comparatively [to other textbooks,] Inhuman Traffick depicts the development of the raw story of enslavement. From the ships to the whips, it shows concrete details of this haunting era while adding an underlying complexity to the story whilst omitting
“Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill” (ThinkExist, 2010, para. 1). This finishes the Tuchman quote by showing the importance of literature to history. We will not be doing the future generations justice by stopping writing books. These things work in tandem, and cannot be replaced by any other. All the examples mentioned prior show great examples that will educate our children about the past for centuries to come. Not only will you get the hard facts about the time period, but also you experience their side of the story and the emotion tied to it. Therefore, literature perfectly reflects history.
But most books over history remained focused on religion or non-fiction. But with Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740, the novel was born. The novel differs from pure non-fiction as the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines the novel as “an invented prose narrative that is usually long and complex and deals especially with human experience through a usually connected sequence of events.” Novels over the years have moved people personally, but political novels especially, incite mass movements including the famous example of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whose book’s impact was so great that Abraham Lincoln famously told her at the start of the Civil War, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this Great War!”
Postmodern literary criticism asserts that art, author, and audience can only be approached through a series of mediating contexts. "Novels, poems, and plays are neither timeless nor transcendent" (Jehlen 264). Even questions of canon must be considered within a such contexts. "Literature is not only a question of what we read but of who reads and who writes, and in what social circumstances...The canon itself is an historical event; it belongs to the history of the school" (Guillory 238,44).
Culture and history are the defining aspects of literary history. Each event throughout history has played a major role in the history of literature and writers today. Each writer throughout history has been influenced either through personal experiences, beliefs, and America’s history. Events such as the Civil War brought about several changes that led to the introduction of new literary genres and styles. Many of these writers wanted to break away from tradition whiles others wanted to write about their beliefs such as religion.
Historical Criticism is criticism that “considers how military, social, cultural, economic, scientific, intellectual, literary, and every other kind of history helps us to understand the author and the work” (Lynn 142). Simply stated, unlike the previously discussed criticisms, Historical Criticism connects a work to certain times or places, revealing its historical influences. Therefore, the reader is required to perform research in order to learn more about the author’s life, the author’s time period and culture, and the way of reasoning during that time. Accordingly, with a critical eye, the reader should relate the information back to the work which will provide the reader with a richer understanding of the reading as well as with author’s message to the reader (Lynn 29-31). Beyond “close reading”, the reader must research what establishes the foundation of the work. Although, below the foundation of a work there lies an even richer understanding of the
For starters, when people read books and stories they tend to try and interpret the storyline by illustrating images in their head; putting themselves in the footsteps of the characters if you will. This not only helps the reader stay interested but also enlightens them on how history has influenced and evolved the thinking of humanity today. Placing world literature readers in the timeline in which they are reading about is a tremendous interest of humanity for generations; if anyone believed this to be a lie, then why do we still own books? In fact, a man many people learn about in world literature, Mark Twain, had a famous quote stating, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” This again all relates to the colossal importance of putting ones self into someone else’s shoes because then you truly understand how life could’ve
History is no more confined to a monolithic collection of facts and their hegemonic interpretations but has found a prominent space in narratives. The recent surge in using narrative in contemporary history has given historical fiction a space in historiography. With Hayden White’s definition of history as a “verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse” literature is perceived to be closer to historiography, in the present age (ix). History has regained acceptance and popularity in the guise of fiction, as signified by the rising status of historical fiction in the post colonial literary world.