Representation of History in Contemporary Literature: Florian Illies's Pop-Chronicle of the Belle Epoque
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1590/S1982-88372014000100026Abstract
Florian Illies' book 1913. Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts (1913. The Year before the Storm) has been a major success with critics and readers. Based on documented facts, the author tells a kind of cultural history of the last year before the Great War, formed by independent episodes from the lives of innumerable persons, mainly artists, writers and other celebrities. Using his imagination and techniques of fictional writing the text shows remarkable proximity to fiction although it does not invent characters or events. The article compares the book to other recent literary representations of history and analyses its narrative structure. It will be shown that the author chose a casual ironical style and an intimate perspective on the protagonists in order to entertain the reader with elements still relevant in our contemporary popular culture. It seems to be intended that the reader develops a kind of counterfactual fantasy that links his present directly to the Golden Age of art, omitting the catastrophes of 20th century.Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
Downloads
Published
2014-06-01
Issue
Section
Literatura/ Cultura - Literatur-/Kulturwissenschaft
License
A Pandaemonium Germanicum adota a política de acesso aberto, conforme a licença BY-NC da Creative Commons.
How to Cite
GALLE, Helmut. Representation of History in Contemporary Literature: Florian Illies’s Pop-Chronicle of the Belle Epoque . Pandaemonium Germanicum, São Paulo, Brasil, v. 17, n. 23, p. 26–49, 2014. DOI: 10.1590/S1982-88372014000100026. Disponível em: https://periodicos.usp.br/pg/article/view/84036.. Acesso em: 22 jul. 2024.