From History-writing to (Hi)story-telling: Historical Novel, Alternate/Counterfactual History and Implicit Uchrony

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to reconstruct the evolutions and the political implications of the Italian historical novel between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. The starting hypothesis is that the historical novel has always performed a vicarious function with respect to traditional historiography. In the Italian case, in particular, the canon of the historical novel has progressively lost the apologetic function it had during the Risorgimento, turning into an instrument of indirect criticism of Italian society after 1861. At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the historical novel had a new editorial fortune, thanks to authors such as Umberto Eco, Valerio Evangelisti, Luther Blissett, Giancarlo De Cataldo, Giuseppe Genna, Tiziano Scarpa and Wu Ming, becoming a very fertile field of historical analysis on the transition from the First to the Second Republic. Finally, thanks to Antonio Scurati, the author of M. Il figlio del secolo, M. L'uomo della provvidenza, and M. Gli ultimi giorni dell'Europa, the historical-documentary-novel has become a perfect tool for a critical analysis of collective memory in Italy. The thesis of this article is that Scurati manages to rediscuss the ways and forms of the historical memory of fascism because he uses an innovative form of counterfactual narration: the implicit uchrony.