Paper short abstract:

How is historical imagination embedded in the writing of fiction? Approaching the subject from the perspective of social history, this presentation examines literary works to observe how they represent what subordinate peoples (the enslaved, dependents, women) do with what is done to them.

Paper long abstract:

How is historical imagination embedded in the writing of fiction? Approaching the subject from the perspective of social history, this presentation examines literary works to observe how they represent what subordinate peoples (the enslaved, dependents, women) do with what is done to them. Seeing fiction as archive also challenges us to acknowledge the imaginative act of constituting archives: historians assemble and interrogate an array of sources to offer plausible interpretations of given historical processes and experiences. They interrogate literary works in pursuit of questions of gender (challenges to patriarchy), labor (crisis of slavery and other forms of forced labor, the emergence of wage labor), scientific ideologies (race science, social Darwinism), relations between literature and the law (fiction as legal archive and fiction in the legal archives), literary models (romanticism, realism, modernism), and so on. Whatever the themes approached, the main objective of this presentation is methodological: what are the main characteristics of a critical process that calls for the slow reading of fictional works in search of the history pulsing within them?