S E C T I O N S

Journeys Back in Time: Historiographic Metafiction and After

Section Chair/ Abstracts, suggestions to:

Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria) [BIO]

Email: lkostova@mbox.digsys.bg

ReferentInnen / Speakers   >>

ABSTRACT:

Canadian literary critic Linda Hutcheon uses the term “historiographic metafiction” in her Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) to describe the postmodern novel’s engagement with history. According to Hutcheon, “historiographic metafiction self-consciously reminds us that while events did occur in the real empirical past, we name and constitute those events as historical facts by selection and narrative positioning" (Poetics 97).

This session will explore the evolution of the metafictional element in historical novels produced over the last 20 years or so. It will address issues such as the following:

•   the ethical parameters of re-writing history;
•   traditional power politics and its reversals;
•   history and the silenced other;
•   irony and multiple perspectives upon history;
•   fools, tricksters, and other anti-heroes;
•   history in/through “impure” spaces;
•   history and the geography of intimacy.

We will examine the continuing relevance of Hutcheon’s term while also attempting to identify new directions in literary practice and develop novel theoretical tools for their analysis.

ReferentInnen / Speakers / Orateurs

• Introduction
  Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria)

• Andrew Miller’s Ingenious Pain: Re-Imagining the Mind/Body Dichotomy and Its Enlightenment Contexts
  Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria)
  ABSTRACT

• Virgins in the Garden
  Elena Andonova (South Western University, Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria)
  ABSTRACT

• “Letters, letters, letters ...”
  Detecting Histories and the Past in A. S. Byatt’s Possession: a Romance (1990)
  Vesselin Budakov (St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, Bulgaria)
  ABSTRACT

• Re-writing History: the Postmodern Lives of Henry James
  Madeleine Danova (St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, Bulgaria)
  ABSTRACT

• A Postmodern Alchemy of Historiography and Bogomil Myths
  Vladimir Zarev’s Novel Rev. Bogomil and the Perfection of Fear
  Svetlana Vassileva (St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, Bulgaria)
  ABSTRACT