Can a literary reality be considered as a historical truth? A New Historical Approach

Many times we come across the terms such as history novel, history poem, and history drama and so on. But the question is how we should interpret the historical events, happenings, characters and settings in a work of art? Should we consider represented events and characters as real which are based on factual events and figures or as imaginary entities or as something between these two, that is a combination of both filtered through the author’s mind? Which ideology does the author support? It is better to have a look at the poststructuralist ideas on history in1960s-70s: First, there are two meanings of the word 'history': (a) the events of the past and (b) telling a story about the events of the past.Poststructuralist thought makes it clear that history is always 'narrated'. Second, historical periods are not unified, state, harmonious, homogeneous entities, there is no single history, only discontinuous and contradictory, heterogeneous histories. Third, historians can no longer claim that their study of the past in detached and objective. Fourth, the relations between literature and history must be rethought.Therefore after reading some poems such as an ode and a sonnet and even an epic we should not jump to the conclusion and write history books based on poetry or a piece of a literary work

کلیدواژه ها:

discourses ، ideological institutions ، new historicism ، poststructuralist ، representation