Brooks, Geraldine
- Autor(en)
- Stefanie Schäfer
- Abstrakt
Geraldine Brooks's writing brings to life cultural history and the history of the book with a feminist spin. Her historical novels oscillate between feminist rewriting and reimagining events as they might have been, making creative use of the gaps in historiography and thus articulating historiographic criticism in a postmodernist vein. The protagonists are eyewitness experiencers of schoolbook histories, such as the Plague in England, the Venice Carnival, the early days of Harvard University, or, in the Pulitzer Prize-awarded novel March , the US American Civil War. Thematically, Brooks's oeuvre focuses on book culture and knowledge production, discussing literacy, the reception and afterlives of literary works, or the absences created by lost books. Her characters speak in period diction, often rendered in intimate and self-reflective genres, such as inner monologue, epistolary or journal writing. To create these voices, Brooks turns to historical sources from the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries. By virtue of the characters, Brooks's writing thus questions historiography's truth claims and foregrounds the workings of storytelling in the sense of Hayden White: history is always rendered in imaginary ways. Brooks's fiction interrogates authoritative versions of history and pulls our attention to those most broadly overlooked in its writing: women.
- Organisation(en)
- Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119431732.ecaf0025
- Publikationsdatum
- 03-2022
- Peer-reviewed
- Ja
- ÖFOS 2012
- 602005 Amerikanistik, 602003 Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft, 605004 Kulturwissenschaft
- Schlagwörter
- Link zum Portal
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/e8c58500-5d0d-47dd-bca9-33007ed9fd59