Literature and History

2. Don't forget their 'reading' of the past will be informed by ideology in the way discussed earlier on the course. And don't forget that any ideological beliefs may be consciously or unconsciously held.

3. Their writing about one period of history (even it is only the recent past) is likely to be informed by the issues of the present in which they are writing.

4. Good writers are often sensitive to social trends, political movements, and psychological states before they become apparent to society in general. This is one way in which they might be said to 'anticipate the future'.

5. Writers are not obliged to be historically accurate. They might distort 'the facts' in order to express what they see as a 'poetic' truth.

6. In some cases, writing about the past is a way of writing about the present. The French novelist Balzac wrote about the early part of the nineteenth century in order to show [as he saw it] how it had been formed. The Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn is currently writing an epic multi-volume novel about the first world war and the Russian revolution - in order to show [as he sees it] 'what went wrong' in history. He is offering a view about the present state of Russia by discussing its past. [And incidentally, he is also much given to issuing warnings about the future.]

7. Some writers have produced texts which 'bear witness'. That is, they have recorded events they might have seen or experienced at first hand. The Italian writer Primo Levi's 'The Juggler' and the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's work 'Requiem' are examples of this genre.

8. It is worth noting in both these cases however, that there are temporal gaps between the event and the literary record of it. Akhmatova's poem is constructed of lyrics composed over a number of years, and Levi's story was written after the war was over. The same is true of the English novelist J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, which described events in 1941 and the years following, but which was not written until the 1980s.

Recommended reading

Whichever historical period you are considering, make sure you have a grasp of its main events.

Selecting your texts

This is a chance to write about Evelyn Waugh's Officers and Gentlemen, Arden's Sergeant Musgrave's Dance, Rudyard Kipling's 'A Sahib's War', Primo Levi's 'The Juggler', Anna Akhmatova's 'Requiem', and you could even use Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (so long as you have not discussed it in a previous assignment).

Extra tips
Don't spend a lot of time writing about theories of history, or offering summaries of the course materials. Your understanding of these issues should be shown via a close examination of your selected texts. One brief introductory paragraph should be all that's required to get the assignment under way.

If you are going to use Mother Courage in your answer, do not spend time describing Brecht's dramatic theory [the Verfremdungseffekt and 'dialectical theatre'] because the question does not ask for it.