| Abstract [eng] |
This article analyses three novels of exceptional content and form, written at the end of the 20th century by Graham Swift, Penelope Lively, and William H. Gass, where the main characters are historians. The historians’ portraits that emerge in the novels Waterland, Moon Tiger and The Tunnel are complicated, melodramatic personalities, rebellious figures bearing a complex fate who try to come to terms with the outcomes of their traumas. They live through the crisis resulting from their traumas and the change of time regimes, reflect on the meaning of the historian’s work, the value of history to people and society, and try to find an answer to the question of whether the ability to tell stories will help them deal with the scars history leaves behind as it breaks people’s destinies. How should historians read and interpret these novels? Can the imagery of a scholar examining the past or lecturing on history created in the pages of a novel tell us something new about how today’s society understands the work done by a historian? How can such portraits of a historian (historians) help us in our analysis of society’s self‑awareness, its experience of time, and historical sensibility? This article seeks answers to the questions raised above. |
