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Historiographic Metafiction
Historiographic metafiction is a term coined by Canadian literary theorist Linda Hutcheon in the late 1980s. It incorporates three domains: fiction, history, and theory. Concept The term is used for works of fiction which combine the literary devices of metafiction with historical fiction. Works regarded as historiographic metafiction are also distinguished by frequent allusions to other artistic, historical and literary texts (i.e. intertextuality) in order to show the extent to which works of both literature and historiography are dependent on the history of discourse. Although Hutcheon said that historiographic metafiction is not another version of the historical novel, there are scholars (e.g. Monika Fludernik) who describe it as such, citing that it is simply an updated late-twentieth-century version of the genre for its embrace of the conceptualizations of the novel and of the historical in the twentieth century. The term is closely associated with works of postmodern ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Canadians
Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being ''Canadian''. Canada is a multilingual and multicultural society home to people of groups of many different ethnic, religious, and national origins, with the majority of the population made up of Old World immigrants and their descendants. Following the initial period of French and then the much larger British colonization, different waves (or peaks) of immigration and settlement of non-indigenous peoples took place over the course of nearly two centuries and continue today. Elements of Indigenous, French, British, and more recent immigrant customs, languages, and religions have combined to form the culture of Canada, and thus a Canadian identity. Canada has also been strongly influenced by its linguistic, geographic, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Kennedy (author)
William Joseph Kennedy (born January 16, 1928) is an American writer and journalist who won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for his novel '' Ironweed''. Many of his novels feature the interactions of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family in Albany, New York. The novels make use of incidents from the city's history as well as the supernatural. Kennedy's works include ''The Ink Truck'' (1969), '' Legs'' (1975), '' Billy Phelan's Greatest Game'' (1978), '' Ironweed'' (1983), '' Roscoe'' (2002) and ''Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes'' (2011). One reviewer said of ''Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes'' that it was "written with such brio and encompassing humanity that it may well deserve to be called the best of the bunch". Kennedy also published a nonfiction book entitled ''O Albany!: Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels'' (1983). Early life Kennedy was born and raised in Albany, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. The major participants in the war threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and deploying the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in human history; it resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, massa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. ( , ; born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For '' Gravity's Rainbow'', Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction."National Book Awards – 1974" National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-29. (With essays by Casey Hicks and Chad Post from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog. The mock acceptance speech by Irwin Corey is not reprinted by NBF.) Hailing from |
Mason & Dixon
''Mason & Dixon'' is a postmodernist novel by American author Thomas Pynchon, published in 1997. It presents a fictionalized account of the collaboration between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in the Dutch Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in British North America on the eve of the Revolutionary War in the United States. The novel, written in a style based on late 18th century English is a frame narrative told from the focal point of Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke, a clergyman of dubious orthodoxy who, on a cold December evening in 1786, attempts to entertain and divert his extended family (partly for amusement, and partly to keep his coveted status as a guest in the house) by telling a tall tale version of Mason and Dixon's biographies (claiming to have accompanied Mason and Dixon throughout their journeys). Background Pynchon began work on the novel as early as 1975, and in 1978 he was reported to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Master Of Petersburg
''The Master of Petersburg'' is a 1994 novel by South African writer J. M. Coetzee. The novel is a work of fiction but features the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky as its protagonist. It is a deep, complex work that draws on the life of Dostoyevsky, the life of the author and the history of Russia to produce profoundly disturbing results. It won the 1995 Irish Times International Fiction Prize. Synopsis The novel begins with Dostoyevsky arriving in Saint Petersburg to collect the belongings of his recently deceased stepson Pavel. Arriving at the flat where Pavel lodged with a widow named Anna Sergeyevna Kolenkina and her young daughter, Matryona, Dostoyevsky discovers that his stepson's personal belongings have been confiscated by the police. Informed by the police that his stepson was an associate of the notorious political agitator Sergey Nechayev, Dostoyevsky finds himself under secret police surveillance. Remaining in Petersburg to wait for the release of his stepson's diar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Ondaatje
Philip Michael Ondaatje (; born 12 September 1943) is a Sri Lankan-born Canadian poet, fiction writer, essayist, novelist, editor, and filmmaker. He is the recipient of multiple literary awards such as the Governor General's Award, the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Prix Médicis étranger. Ondaatje is also an Officer of the Order of Canada, recognizing him as one of Canada's most renowned living authors. Ondaatje's literary career began with his poetry in 1967, publishing ''The Dainty Monsters'', and then in 1970 the critically acclaimed '' The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.'' However, he is more recently recognized for his nationally and internationally successful novel '' The English Patient'' (1992), which was adapted into a film in 1996. In 2018, Ondaatje won the Golden Man Booker Prize for ''The English Patient''. In addition to his literary writing, Ondaatje has been an important force in "fostering new Canadian writing""Michael Ondaatje." In ''An Antholog ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The English Patient
''The English Patient'' is a 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje. The book follows four dissimilar people brought together at an Italian villa during the Italian Campaign of the Second World War. The four main characters are: an unrecognisably burned man — the eponymous patient, presumed to be English; his Canadian Army nurse; a Sikh British Army sapper; and a Canadian thief. The story occurs during the North African Campaign and centres on the incremental revelations of the patient's actions prior to his injuries, and the emotional effects of these revelations on the other characters. The story is told by multiple characters and "authors" of books the characters are reading. The book is, in part, a sequel to the 1987 novel ''In the Skin of a Lion'', which continues the story of characters of his stories, Hana and Caravaggio, as well as revealing the fate of the latter's main character, Patrick Lewis. It won the 1992 Booker Prize, the 1992 Governor General's Award and the 2018 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Possession (Byatt Novel)
''Possession: A Romance'' is a 1990 best-selling novel by British writer A. S. Byatt that won the 1990 Booker Prize for Fiction. The novel explores the postmodern concerns of similar novels, which are often categorised as historiographic metafiction, a genre that blends approaches from both historical fiction and metafiction. The novel follows two modern-day academics as they research the paper trail around the previously unknown love life between famous fictional poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. ''Possession'' is set both in the present day and the Victorian era, contrasting the two time periods, as well as echoing similarities and satirising modern academia and mating rituals. The structure of the novel incorporates many different styles, including fictional diary entries, letters and poetry, and uses these styles and other devices to explore the postmodern concerns of the authority of textual narratives. The title ''Possession'' highlights many of the m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shashi Tharoor
Shashi Tharoor (; ; born 9 March 1956 in London, England ) is an Indian former international civil servant, diplomat, bureaucrat and politician, writer and public intellectual who has been serving as Member of Parliament for Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, since 2009. He is the Chairman of the Standing Committee on Chemicals and Fertilizers. He was formerly Under-Secretary General of the United Nations and unsuccessfully ran for the post of Secretary-General in 2006. Founder-Chairman of All India Professionals Congress, he formerly served as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs and on Informational Technology. Born in London, UK, and raised in India, Tharoor worked across the world, graduating from St. Stephen's College, Delhi in 1975 and culminated his studies in 1978 with a doctorate in International Relations and Affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. At the age of 22, he was the youngest person at the time to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Great Indian Novel
''The Great Indian Novel'' is a satirical novel by Shashi Tharoor, first published by Viking Press in 1989. It is a fictional work that takes the story of the ''Mahabharata'', the Indian epic, and recasts and resets it in the context of the Indian Independence Movement and the first three decades post-independence. Figures from Indian history are transformed into characters from mythology, and the mythical story of India is retold as a history of Indian independence and subsequent history, up through the 1970s. Some critics have identified an element of subversion in the novel. The work includes numerous puns and allusions to famous works about India, such as those by Rudyard Kipling, Paul Scott, and E. M. Forster. The ''Mahabharata'' is an epic tale describing the historical dynastic struggle over the throne of the kingdom of Hastinapur between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, two branches of the heirs of the King Shantanu. In his novel, Tharoor recasts the story of the nasc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (; born 19 June 1947) is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, '' Midnight's Children'' (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize. After his fourth novel, ''The Satanic Verses'' (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a '' fatwa'' calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. Numerous killings and bombings have been carried out by extremists who cite the book as motivation, sparking a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. On 12 August 2022, a man stabbed Rushdie after rushing onto ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
