午夜剧场

The Japanese are a people who love history. Publishers release multi-volume history series covering both Japanese and world history, magazines feature specials on heroes and great figures, and television repeatedly broadcasts dramas and educational programs centered on historical characters. Hidden within this is the question of what modern people learn from history.

However, history is not made solely by heroes and great figures, nor is it formed only by major events. Anonymous masses move history, and history has been driven by seemingly casual events and shifts in mentality. Literature and historiography have focused on these undercurrents of history. This book focuses on modern France to discuss how literature and historiography grasped the mechanisms of history and how they refined methods for narrating it.

In France, realist literature and historiography as an academic discipline were established during the same period in the first half of the 19th century. Today, literature and historiography are treated as completely different fields. At the time, however, the two did not stand in opposition as fiction versus fact or narrative versus science; rather, both were positioned complementarily as discourses that interpreted historical reality and described the customs of the people.

In Part 1, I discuss how literature represented history, focusing on authors such as Balzac, Hugo, and Flaubert. Realist literature, on the one hand, clarified the stance of interpreting the present as history, and on the other hand, recognized issues in the past that resonate with the present. This is precisely why so many historical novels were written at that time.

In Part 2, relying on the works of historians such as Michelet and Corbin, I attempt to show that historians have experimented with various "poetics" of narrating history, sometimes inspired by literary techniques.

In contemporary France, there are excellent writers of historical novels who narrate World War II using unique methods, as well as historians who introduce their own "I" into historical narratives, suggesting that the relationship between literature and historiography is entering a new phase. I find this to be a very interesting phenomenon.

In this book, I also briefly discuss the situation in Japan regarding historical perception and the creation of images of great figures in history. I would be honored if you would pick up a copy.

Kosei Ogura

Hosei University Press

328 pages, 3,520 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.