When Literary Men Become Historians: The Role of Literature in Presenting History through Selected Postmodern Fictions- A Thematic Study

Volume 20 , Issue 3 , December 2019 , Pages 685-698

Authors

Zhino Jabbar Mohammed 1

1 Department of English, College of Languages, University of Sulaimani ,Kurdistan region,Iraq

DOI logo 10.17656/jzsb.10934

Keywords

Abstract

This paper is about the role of literature in presenting history in selected postmodern novels.
History or retelling past events has become a prominent subject matter of a number of postmodern
fictions. This study provides a clearer understanding of the way how literary writers present theme
of history through postmodern novels, among them Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983), Toni
Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated (2002). This
paper is significant in the field of Postmodern Literature, in particular, postmodern novels. It will
contribute to both fields of postmodernism and history. It will answer the following questions: what
is the role of literature in telling history? How does literature make history memorable? Can a
literary writer be a historian? How is history presented in the selected postmodern novels? Using
the postmodern literary approach, we will reach to the findings of the paper that through the selected
postmodern novels, the use of postmodern literary forms and collective memory of the past will
affect the reader’s consciousness to make the expressions rather attached to the reader’s senses.
Moreover, a literary writer can be a historian as well via entailing a degree of power over people’s
perception of actual truth of the past through the use of imagination and rhetorical devices to arouse
certain emotions. Also, theme of history has been depicted through the use of literary techniques.
The findings of this study would be beneficial and valuable for students and researchers of the
literary and cultural studies, departments of English, and British and American Literature especially
postmodern novels.

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  • Published at26 December 2019

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