History Made, History Imagined

Know about the book -

History Made, History Imagined is written by David Walter Price and published by University of Illinois Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0252067762 (ISBN 10) and 9780252067761 (ISBN 13).

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 countermemory 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.