Historical and religious speculations in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci code: A postmodernist study

Abstract

Dan Brown is a postmodernist writer. He was born on 22Jun, 1964 in Exeter, New Hampshire US. Brown wrote a various number of what is called historiographic metafiction novel. This term has been equivalent to postmodernism in fiction and has become so popular trend of writing in the 70s and 80s. Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code (2003) is a "postmodern historical novel", in which he treats a large number of matters such as the questioning of the authority of Catholicism and conservative Protestantism. He used many sources to make his argument more believable and could be read as a realistic novel, such as Holy Grail and Holy Blood, The Dead Sea Scrolls, and The Gnostic Nag Hammadi. The paper will investigate the historical and religious speculations of Da Brown as reflected in Da Vinci Cod relying on the critical theory of postmodernism. The novel involves many postmodernist elements such as the use of textual and historical debate of the Holy Grail and Holy Blood. Dan Brown has challenged the Holy Writ "Biblical" authority when describing it as historically elevate, biased, and made to suppress Jesus's fact. The paper ends with a conclusion that clarifies how we could read The Da Vinci Code as a postmodern novel.