Postcolonialism and the Historical Novel
Epistemologies of Contemporary Realism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13015482 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hamish Dalley (Australian National University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 51-67 |
| Publication date | 2014-02-12 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2052-2614 • E-ISSN: 2052-2622 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/pli.2013.3 |
| OpenAlex | W2048564415 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 24 |
The historical novel is one of the most popular and critically significant genres of postcolonial writing, but, to date, almost no systematic scholarship is dedicated to it. This essay proposes theoretical and critical parameters for exploring this genre. It begins with the observation that plausibility is a key principle articulated by many postcolonial writers and explores how framing novels in these terms, as a kind of realism, requires readers to negotiate heterogeneous structures of reference—and, in particular, to read imaginary characters as abstractions of historical phenomena. The second half of the paper explores the theoretical implications of this ontological heterogeneity, suggesting how the genre’s conventions are inflected by normative patterns of gender, race, and temporality. Overall, I propose that it is possible to read the postcolonial historical novel as a kind of allegory, and I offer the term allegorical realism to describe this paradoxical mixing of conceptual and affective knowledge
Aesthetics · Allegory · Art · Colonialism · Epistemology · Framing (construction · Literature · Negotiation · Normative · Political science · Postcolonial literature · Postcolonialism (international relations · Psychoanalysis · Realism · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Temporality · The Imaginary · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology
Factual fictions
Postcolonial Studies and the Literary
The Postcolonial Unconscious
Specters of the Atlantic
A Poetics of Postmodernism
Provincializing Europe
Morning yet on creation day
The rise of the novel
Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
The Achievement of Literary Authority
British Colonial Realism in Africa
Bardic Nationalism
Inheriting the Past
What Would Napoleon Do
Possible Worlds of Fiction and History
Claiming History
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2024 (3) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |