How to Tell History: Dialogue between Literature and Historiography in Modern and Contemporary France

2021/12/21

The Japanese are a nation of history lovers. Publishers release multi-volume history series covering both Japanese and world history, magazines feature specials on heroes and great figures, and television repeatedly broadcasts dramas and educational programs centered on historical figures. Underlying this is the question of what modern people can learn from history.

However, history is not made solely by heroes and great figures, nor is it formed only by major events. Anonymous masses move history, and history has been driven by seemingly trivial events and shifts in mentality. Literature and historiography have focused on these undercurrents of history. This book focuses on modern France and discusses how literature and historiography have grasped the mechanisms of history and refined the methods of narrating it.

In France, realist literature and historiography as an academic discipline emerged simultaneously in the first half of the 19th century. Today, literature and historiography are treated as completely different fields. At the time, however, the two did not stand in opposition as fiction versus fact or narrative versus science; rather, both were positioned complementarily as discourses that interpreted historical reality and described national customs.

In Part 1, I discuss how literature represented history, focusing on authors such as Balzac, Hugo, and Flaubert. Realist literature, on the one hand, clearly adopted a stance of interpreting the present as history, while on the other hand, it recognized issues in the past that resonated with the present. This is precisely why so many historical novels were written during that period.

In Part 2, drawing on the works of historians such as Michelet and Corbin, I attempt to show how historians have experimented with various "poetics" of narrating history, sometimes inspired by literary techniques.

In contemporary France, there are excellent writers of historical novels who narrate World War II using unique methods, as well as historians who introduce their own "I" into historical narratives. The relationship between literature and historiography seems to be entering a new phase. I find this to be a very interesting phenomenon.

In this book, I also briefly discuss the situation in Japan regarding historical perception and the creation of images of great figures in history. I hope you will pick up a copy.

How to Tell History: Dialogue between Literature and Historiography in Modern and Contemporary France

Kosei Ogura

Hosei University Press

328 pages, 3,520 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.