History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and the Past

In this provocative and original study, David Price investigates history as a form of poiesis - the act of making in language - and suggests that certain novels can provide the best means of engaging in historical interpretation. Contending that the fundamental act of narration itself, including the narration of history, expresses a system of values, Price explores the work of seven contemporary novelists who share a commitment to reexamining history as idea and a refusal to accept history as given. Within a theoretical framework based on Friedrich Nietzsche and Giambattista Vico, Price investigates how these writers - Carlos Fuentes, Susan Daitch, Salman Rushdie, Michel Tournier, Ishmael Reed, Graham Swift, and Mario Vargas Llosa - create a discursive space between history and literature, a space within which history can be questioned and the making of history explored.Through their novels, these writers replace the univocal expression of history as a description of 'what really happened' with a polyvocality of competing discourses, languages, and points of view. Price's investigation of three modalities of the poietic novel - the history of forgotten possibilities, the construction of counter memory and cultural critique, and history as myth - has far-reaching implications for how we read and question the narratives we understand as history. By treating the past as a dynamic flow of values, rather than a fixed collection of facts, "History Made, History Imagined" fosters a deeper understanding not only of literature and philosophy but also of history and our relationship to it.