Post 9 11 Historical Fiction And Alternate History Fiction

Drawing on theories of historiography, memory, and diaspora, as well as from existing genre studies, this book explores why contemporary writers are so fascinated with history. Pei-chen Liao considers how fiction contributes to the making and remaking of the transnational history of the U.S. by thinking beyond and before 9/11, investigating how the dynamics of memory, as well as the emergent present, influences readers’ reception of historical fiction and alternate history fiction and their interpretation of the past. Set against the historical backdrop of WWII, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror, the novels under discussion tell Jewish, Japanese, white American, African, Muslim, and Native Americans’ stories of trauma and survival. As a means to transmit memories of past events, these novels demonstrate how multidirectional memory can be not only collective but connective, as exemplified by the echoes that post-9/11 readers hear between different histories of violence that the novels chronicle, as well as between the past and the present.

It is the spring of 1944 and the outcome of World War II hangs in the balance, everything now hinges on an imminent Allied Invasion into France, D-Day. If the invasion is successful the Allies win, if it fails Germany will be the victor. Field Marshal Rommel is convinced a change in strategy and new weapons will stop the Allies, all he has to do is to convince the Fuhrer and The German High Command before it is too late. Meanwhile, two brothers stand on the opposite side of the channel, each one dedicate to his own particular band of brothers. In occupied France a young German soldier stands alongside his fellow troops, despite his apprehension at what lies ahead he knows he must do everything to fulfil his duties and maintain his honour in the oncoming hell that will be the battle for the beaches. In England an ambitious young GI has completed his training and impatiently awaits the order to embark on the boats heading for the Normandy beaches, knowing that when he disembarks he will be facing the guns and might of the German Army, and haunted by the thought that his own brother is somewhere in occupied Europe. In this exciting historical fantasy novel that explains Rommel’s alternative strategy and explores what could have been the outcome if he had won his struggle with his own high command, we experience the daily life and preparations of ordinary soldiers as invasion nears, and through explicit battle scenes, explore the bloody horror of the D-Day invasion through the eyes of two brothers whom fate has cast on opposing sides. Volume 1 D-Day The Battle for Normandy: Small Arms Decide the Fate in Normandy Volume 2 D-Day The Soldier's Story

Professional historians, schools, colleges and universities are not alone in shaping higher-order understanding of history. The central thesis of this book is the belief historical fiction in text and film shape attitudes towards an understanding of history as it moves the focus from slavery to the enslaved—from the institution to the personal, families and feminist accounts. In a broader sense, this contributes to a public history. In part, using the quickly growing corpus of neo-slave counterfactual narratives, this book examines the notion of the emerging slavery public history, and the extent to which this is defined by literature, film and other forms of artistic expression, rather than non-fiction—popular or scholarly—and education in history in the school systems. Inter alia, this book looks to the validity of historical fiction in print or in film as a way of understanding history. A focal point of this book is the hypothesis that neo-slave narratives—supported by selective triangulated readings and viewings of scholarly works and non-fiction—have assisted greatly in re-shaping the historiography of antebellum slavery, and scholarly historians followed in the wake of these developments. Essentially, this has meant a re-shaping of the historiography with a focus from slavery to that of the enslaved. Moreover, it has opened new vistas for a public history, devoid of top-down authoritative scholarship. An important and provocative read for students and scholars interested in understanding the history of slavery, its harrowing effects and how it was culturally defined.

This book imagines how Europe might re-organise and re-group after the COVID-19 crisis by assessing its effectiveness when responding to it. For this purpose, it directs its focus on: i) sovereignty challenges; ii) technological challenges and iii) governance challenges. These three challenges do not present hermetic legal problems, they intersect and connect on many levels. The book shows this by examining the relationship between public and private power, and illustrating how the rise of technocratic authority is deeply connected to the choice of technological solutions. It illustrates how constitutional decisions taken during states of emergency give rise to private governance challenges related to cybersecurity and data protection. Experts from the fields of EU governance, data protection, and technology explore these questions to provide answers to how the EU might develop in the future.

This volume offers critical perspectives on memories of political and socioeconomic ‘transitions’ that took place between the 1970s and 1990s across the globe and that inaugurated the end of the Cold War. The essays respond to a wealth of recent works of literature, film, theatre, and other media in different languages that rethink the transformations of those decades in light of present-day crises. The authors scrutinize the enduring silences produced by established frameworks of memory and time and explore the mnemonic practices that challenge these frameworks by positing radical ambivalence or by articulating new perspectives and subjectivities. As a whole, the volume contributes to current debates and theory-making in critical memory studies by reflecting on how the changing recollection of transitions constitutes a response to the crisis of memory and time regimes, and how remembering these times as crises renders visible continuities between this past and the present. It is a valuable resource for academics, students, practitioners, and general readers interested in exploring the dynamics of memory in post-authoritarian societies.

This edited collection offers an exploration of American literature in the age of Trumpism—understood as an ongoing sociopolitical and affective reality—by bringing together analyses of some of the ways in which American writers have responded to the derealization of political culture in the United States and the experience of a ‘new’ American reality after 2016. The volume’s premise is that the disruptions and dislocations that were so exacerbated by the political ascendancy of Trump and his spectacle-laden presidency have unsettled core assumptions about American reality and the possibilities of representation. The blurring of the relationship between fact and fiction, bolstered by the discourses of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts,’ has not only drawn attention to the shattering of any notion of ‘shared’ reality, but has also forced a reexamination of the purpose and value of literature, especially when considering its troubled relation to the representation of ‘America.’ The authors in this collection respond to the invitation to reassess the workings of fiction and critique in an age of Trumpism by considering some of the most recent literary responses to the (new) American realit(ies)—including works by Colson Whitehead, Ben Winters, Claudia Rankine, Gary Shteyngart, Jennifer Egan, and Steve Erickson, to name but a few—, some of which were composed in the run-up to the 2016 election but were able to accurately and incisively imagine the world to come.

Rejection and Disaffiliation in Twenty-First Century American Immigration Narratives examines changing attitudes about national sovereignty and affiliation. Katie Daily delinks twenty-first century American immigration narratives from 9/11, examining genre alterations within a scope of literary analysis that is wider than what “post-9/11” allows. What emerges is an understanding of the speed at which the rhetoric and aims of many twenty-first century immigration narratives significantly depart from the traditions established post-1900. Daily investigates a recent trend in which novelists and filmmakers question what it means to be an immigrant in contemporary America and explores how these “disaffiliation” narratives challenge some of the most fundamental traditions in American literature and society.

'Needing Napoleon' is a remarkably original feat of imagination: an irresistible adventure that spirits the reader from present-day Paris to the battle of Waterloo and beyond.Can you change what has already happened? As a history teacher, Richard Davey knows the answer. At least, he thinks he does. On holiday in Paris, he stumbles across a curious antiques shop. The eccentric owner reveals a secret Richard dares not believe. Richard's conviction that Napoleon Bonaparte should have won the Battle of Waterloo could be put to the test. Accurate historical detail collides with the paradox of time travel as an ordinary twenty-first-century man is plunged into the death throes of the French empire.