https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/317 Numéros fr jeu., 19 mai 2022 12:25:29 +0200 jeu., 07 déc. 2023 10:13:39 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/317 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/323 jeu., 19 mai 2022 12:25:50 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/323 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/327 What if Uchronia had been invented during the 17th Century? In the novel Polexandre, Marin Le Roy de Gomberville recycled an old project of his, i.e. a chronicle of the Last Valois Kings, mixing facts and fiction with a lot of freedom. As he stated in Le Discours sur les Vices et les Vertus de l’Histoire (Discourse on the vices and virtues of History), true history could offend and had to be transformed. Invention is based on a “normalized narrative of the real past” (Singles). Parallels between past and present enable the writer to express regrets and to imagine plausible divergent histories, directly influenced by the preoccupations of the time. The narration questions the foundation of History itself and of the received identity of famous historical figures. jeu., 19 mai 2022 12:32:24 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/327 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/329 Historiettes can be defined as a collection of small memoirs in which Tallemant des Réaux reconstructed the reign of Henri IV and the regency of Anne d’Autriche. This collection of stories reshuffles the events reported in official Historiography, giving scandalous and private anecdotes of the more or less major figures of the time. The article reflects on the form of counterfactual history in a genre that is supposed to depict historical figures with a zest of funny, strange and picturesque details. jeu., 19 mai 2022 12:36:35 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/329 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/331 In the aftermath of 1974 and the victory of democracy in Portugal, a number of Portuguese writers have deconstructed History and the representation of illustrious figures. Irony questions the legitimizing process of History. Amongst these writers, the article focusses on José Saramago who satirizes the past using metafictional elements. He creates new dynamics in Portuguese historical writing by undermining the conventional way so-called heroes are depicted. jeu., 19 mai 2022 12:43:10 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/331 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/333 Biographical sources and documents appear to be scarce on the life of Zheng He. The interest he sparked is mainly a 20th-century phenomenon, starting after 1905. From this time on, he was represented as a great seafarer of the Chinese motherland and became an acclaimed national hero. Building the hypothesis of a Chinese worldwide circumnavigation, Gavin Menzies explores the idea that Zheng He might have discovered America in 1421. Liu Cixin follows Menzies’s hypothesis and imagines what would have happened if Zheng He had discovered America and how China could have taken the lead in a new world order. jeu., 19 mai 2022 12:52:18 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/333 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/335 As in other cultures, contemporary writers in India are retelling ancient myths from a new perspective. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions (2008) and Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni: The Story of Draupadi (1995) thus relay one of the major works of Hindu culture, the Mahābhārata, through the eyes of Draupadi, wife to the five Pandava brothers, while in Asura: Tale of the Vanquished (2015), Anand Neelakantan reworks another major myth, the Rāmāyana, to give voice to an even more marginalized cast-out, the demon Rāvana, as does Arun Kukreja in his play Dashaanan (2004). The idealized male heroes of Indian mythology thus come under the scathing gaze of their wife or opponent, and the core values of ancient myth are radically questioned. jeu., 19 mai 2022 13:02:14 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/335 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/337 At a time when Bonapartists struggled to regain power in France, the writer Louis Geoffroy imagined his hero, Napoleon, conquering first Europe, then the world, all nations (even Russia, England) bowing to his irresistible drive which stretches to Africa and the Middle East, to China, Japan, and all Pacific islands, to the American continent–to the point where every nation and every aspect of government is under Napoleon’s thumb, History effectually comes to an end, and strife between nations gives way to spectacular scientific and technical invention. Beyond the gratifications of revanche-driven uchronia, Geoffroy’s work strikes a sinister note as civil liberties are sacrificed on the altar of peace and progress. jeu., 19 mai 2022 13:19:31 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/337 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/339 From the Second World War to the present day, a flourishing crop of uchronias allowed Italian authors to grapple with the country’s Fascist past. Marra frames these works within their political and historical context, firmly linking those published in the immediate aftermath of the war to far-right activism, while later works, in reaction to the first, were more critical of Fascism, and later still, adopted a more playful angle (thus Massimo Mongai recasts “Benny” Mussolini as a placid Italian-American author of science-fiction and uchronia). Political activism has not disappeared for all that, as the far-right CasaPound movement recently demonstrated by sponsoring Mussolini-centred uchronias. Marra concludes that such partisan works are narratively flawed, for in order to vindicate Mussolini and Fascism, they are forced to distort History in a more artificial way than other, more distanced uchronias. jeu., 19 mai 2022 13:25:43 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/339 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/342 Focusing on Pratchett’s lavish depiction of an alternate universe, the paper underscores parallels between its imaginary, all-powerful ruler, Veterini, and some actual Renaissance counterparts. More significantly, Veterini appears to embody Macchiavelli’s Prince (with a dash of Hobbes). Thus counter-factual reality allows a philosophical, theoretic character to come to life and effectively exert power, another instance of the political use of uchronia. The relation between counterfactual and factual seems embodied by the art of “stealth chess” which Veterini excels at, where an additional space outside the checkers (the “Slurks”) allows the player to move his pawn in an unplottable way. jeu., 19 mai 2022 13:35:20 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/figures-historiques/342