Atıf İçin Kopyala
Yılmaz S.
Third International BAKEA Symposium: “History”, Gaziantep, Türkiye, 9 - 11 Ekim 2013
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Basıldığı Şehir:
Gaziantep
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Basıldığı Ülke:
Türkiye
Özet
Alternate history as a literary genre deals
with what could have happened, instead of what is known to have happened. As Andy
Duncan defines it; alternate history is “a work of fiction in which history as
we know it is changed for dramatic and often ironic effect.” (Duncan 209) Alternate histories create a
ground for speculating on the literariness of history as well as presenting
several possibilities against one single truth. Writers of alternate history
take on the job of historians while writing their works and cause the
distinction between history and fiction to become blurred. Since history and
past are not the same notions and what happened in the past can never be known
as it had happened; history becomes a fluid matter which is open to
manipulation. Thus, alternate history writers take this manipulation to a
higher level and re-write commonly
accepted realities. They present the question “what if..?” and while answering
their question they carefully construct new realities equally credible as the
history that we know. For instance, in The
Man in the High Castle (1962), Philip K. Dick presents a North
America which is shared by two dominant forces; the Japanese and
the Germans who won World War II. The West of America is occupied by the
Japanese while the Germans hold the Eastern part. Similarly, in his novel Pavane (1968), Keith Roberts speculates
on what could have happened if the Catholics assassinated Queen Elizabeth and Vatican
was still the dominant force in 1960s. This paper analyzes these two novels as
examples of alternate history and examines their relationship with the actual
history which also uses literary devices in its construction.