Issue Details: First known date: 2020... 2020 Jo Jones on Fiction and the ‘History Wars’
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'‘Some stories are hard to tell’, says the blurb of Jo Jones’ recent book on fiction and the history wars. For a debate that swirls around the limits of history and fiction to get at ‘the truth’, this statement is perhaps truest of all. While the history wars have been characterised by politicised contests over the past, arguing over terminology such as ‘invasion’ and ‘settlement’, ‘commemoration’ and ‘celebration’, it was the contest over ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ that caught historians and fiction writers off-guard. When the novelist Kate Grenville suggested that her book, The Secret River, was able to straddle the polarisation of the history wars because fiction can come to history from the perspective of empathy and imagination, several historians bristled. Rather than being bound by contests over evidence and interpretation, a ‘novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, and say there is another way to understand this’, Grenville insisted. In response, historians such as Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen refused to accept that disciplinary history might be less equipped to understand or interpret the past.' (Introduction)

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    y separately published work icon History Australia vol. 17 no. 2 2020 19797942 2020 periodical issue

    'We write this introduction in changed and challenging circumstances, with an acute awareness of how unevenly the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have been distributed among the AHA membership and wider readership of History Australia, even as narratives of this crisis suggest that ‘we’ are all experiencing this ‘together in lockdown’. At the same time, the Australian Historical Association, this journal and its diverse membership are working to nourish our disciplinary community in a period when our connections with each other can no longer be embodied in the physical space of departments, conferences, seminars, museums and libraries. We are, for the moment, a community enacted almost entirely through virtual and other mediums, and these are meagre substitutes. Our weekly editorial meetings, once treasured moments of connection, laughter and collegiality around a table, now take place on Zoom, with words and phrases sometimes garbled or lost in their translation from sound, to data and back to sound again. Many of us are having to learn how to work together without being together. The loss is acute. We hope that the arrival of issue 17.2 reminds our members, authors and readers of their membership in a community of historians in, of or from Australia.' (Leigh Boucher, Michelle Arrow, Kate Fullagar, From the Editors, introduction)

    2020
    pg. 414-415
Last amended 4 Aug 2020 10:26:19
414-415 Jo Jones on Fiction and the ‘History Wars’small AustLit logo History Australia
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