History and the Past: The Poetics of the Historical Novel

Abstract

The text examines the complex relations between the past, history, and historical myth, in an interdisciplinary perspective, combining narratology, cognitive studies and cultural anthropology. The author redefines the interdependencies between the terms “the past,” “history,” and “myth,” pointing to the differences between the poetics of different historical narratives, as well as the cognitive potential of the category of the sign, semantic structure, and semantic function in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research on artistic and non-artistic accounts of the past.