A star-shaped crossroad: From (counterfactual) historiography to historiographic metafiction

Abstract

In the 1970s, Hayden White stirred a heated debate about similarities between historiography and fiction. In his monographs Metahistory (1973) and Tropics of Discourse (1978), he developed a theory that from the discourse perspective, the process of writing a historiographic text and writing fiction is no different as they use the same strategies. Lubomir Dolezel, in his Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: Postmodern Stage (2010), reacts to this theory and takes the argument further, claiming that the comparison of historiography and fiction has reached a dead end and needs to be researched from a new perspective that of the possible worlds theory. The debate between White's and Dolezel's theories re-establishes the borderline between historiography and fiction but does not provide a fully satisfying answer when it comes to distinguishing between historiography and specific genres of fiction, such as historiographic fiction. Problems also arise when using the possible worlds theory as a tool for differentiating between fiction, historiographic fiction and counterfactual historiography. Concerning the increasingly popular trend of counterfactual historiography, as defined by Niall Ferguson in his introduction to Virtual History (1997), this paper notes the insufficiency of Dolezel's criteria for the reestablishment of the borderline between historiography and fiction.