History, Romantically Imagined: A Conceptual Approach

Abstract

The relationship between the novel and history is an open, ever-renewing one, fraught with numerous complexities and questions. This stems from the fact that the novel is a literary discourse that seeks artistic pleasure, whereas history is a factual discourse that aims to arrive at truth. These complexities have come to the fore whenever the novelist has taken history as a broad terrain upon which to draw on the factual dimension in constructing a fictional narrative.Dynamic, open, and aesthetic in nature, this article aims to trace the manifestations of the intermingling—or intersection—between the historical and the fictional within narrative discourse, by delineating the boundaries and definitions between history and fiction, as well as the imagination and interpretation of history.