Confronting the Burden of History: Literary Representations of the Past

Paperback, 225 pages, NOT ex-library. Book looks unread, little minor handling wear, clean and bright throughout with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps. Tight binding, spine free of creases. Price blacked out on rear cover. -- This collection of essays explores the dynamic interaction between literature and historical representation and offers diverse perspectives on how fiction engages with historical narratives. The book is divided into four sections, each addressing a distinct approach to narrating and interpreting history. The opening section critiques traditional historiography, with Hayden White's essay leading an analysis of alternative representations. The subsequent essays examine contemporary novels that reimagine historical events through postmodern techniques, and how fiction, particularly by writers like Philip Roth and Téa Obreht, challenges established historical truths. Part Two focuses on personal trauma set against the backdrop of national history, exploring works by authors such as Toni Morrison and J.M. Coetzee. Part Three shifts attention to Jewish experiences as central to the understanding of historical memory, with essays reflecting on Holocaust representations and Jewish identity in the works of W.G. Sebald. Finally, Part Four deals with history as a space of memory, analyzing literature, art, and music as mediums for preserving and reconstructing the past. -- Contents: Preface; Part One: Challenging the Historical Past: Alternative Representations -- 1. Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief / Hayden White; 2. Postmodern Historical Novel: A Contribution to Historiographic Inquiry / Bozena Kucala; 3. Confronting Historicity: Louise Erdrich's Native American Fiction / Grazyna Maria-Teresa Branny; 4. What If? Philip Roth's The Plot Against America / Sárka Bubíková; 5. Eschewing Factuality: Téa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife / Beata Piatek; Part Two: Personal Trauma and the Burden of National History -- 6. Story of Margaret Garner, or How History Disremembers the Past, and Toni Morrison's Act of the Imagination / Michal Palmowski; 7. 'Imagining the Unimaginable.' Confronting the Burden of Colonial History in J.M. Coetzee's In the Heart of the Country / Marek Pawlicki; 8. Intersection of History and Ordinary Lives: Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift / Krystyna Stamirowska; 9. Stealing the Baby from the Crib: The Burden of Scottish History and Cultural Misrepresentation / Olga Roebuck; Part Three: Jewish Experience as a Master Narrative -- 10. Myth of the Wandering Jew in W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz / Dagmar Blight; 11. Traces of the Holocaust in the Oeuvre of J.M. Coetzee / Robert Kusek; Part Four: The Space of Memory: Fragments and Ruins -- 12. Ruination of Things Past: On W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz / Karolina Kolenda; 13. Texts like Fractals: 'Memory Spaces' and the 'Black Carnival' of 9/11 / Ewa Kowal; Contributors -- "This collection of essays has grown out of a project undertaken at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow in cooperation with the International Visegrad Fund. The inspiration for the project came from the work of Professor Hayden White, who kindly accepted the project coordinators' invitation to give a lecture and conduct a workshop for scholars from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The resultant material has been divided into four sections which exemplify diverse aspects of fiction's engagement with history. In the opening essay, Professor White offers an outstanding analysis of Saul Friedlander's 'Nazi Germany and the Jews' as an example of the kind of historiography which may be capable of giving an account of historical events whose appalling nature defies representation and thus eschews older conventions of historical scholarship.". …