Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Jul 2019)
Validity of the historical novel. A journey through key theoretical aspects and a first approach to the historical novel with a medieval theme
Abstract
In this work we will go through some theoretical aspects related to the particularities of the historical novel. We will go over, very briefly, traits linked to interdisciplinarity, the fictional status of the genre, temporality, the eagerness of totality, and the construction of the individual, the otherness and a social collective. For this, we will take into account especially the last relevant contributions in the field. Our aim is to take a first step in the construction of a theory of the historical novel of medieval theme produced from the second half of the 20th century. We start from the consideration that the medieval imaginary translates the perception of a dissolution of cultural paradigms and a denaturalization of certain truths considered as timeless. The historical novels of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century recover the Middle Ages for reasons linked to the new geopolitical map that began to be delineated after the second postwar period. One of the ways to decipher the crisis of the present is to resort to a "medieval revisionism", incorporating not only their cultures but, also, attributing to the modern texts that use them as matter an interpretation determined by modern ideological and cultural parameter.
