The Plural History of Memory: A Polyphonic Novel by Ángela Hernández

Abstract

The possibilities offered by the historical novel as a means of highlighting complex and multiple identities, situations, inquests, and injustice have been used to great effect by women writers in recent times. As de Groot explains, the virtue of the historical novel is that it enforces on the reader a sense of historicized “difference,” and it is a mode that has an effect on the normative experience of the everyday and the contemporary world (4). There are numerous recent studies that analyze the evolution of historical novels written by women. These studies have shown the gradual shift of how this sub-genre2 is assessed critically and why these novels have been such a success for the publishers. These writers of historical novels have been offered a context so that their historical settings are focused directly or indirectly on a female consciousness and explore female fears and desires. Perhaps even more important for women writers has been the way that the historical novel has allowed them to invent or “re-imagine” (to borrow Linda Anderson’s term [1990, 129], the unrecorded lives of marginalised and subordinated people, especially women, but also the working classes, […] the lives of the conquered, the victimised and the marginalised, those left out of traditional histories written by the (male) victors. (Wallace, 2) KeywordsDominican RepublicHistorical FactDictatorial RegimeHistory BookCultural MemoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.