The conquest of the "space-in-between": the trajectory of the historical novel in America

Abstract

This paper has as maim purpose to show that the genre of the historical novel has had in America a trajectory which has passed through all the ways this literary genre has known in Europe since its beginning with Walter Scott (1819), until its contemporary configuration. Here in America, however, this hybrid narrative genre found a universe in which the historical realities are so unique that once they are turned into fiction by novelists worried about giving the right to voice to those people who were colonized, it has generated works of art which have printed new configurations to the old models. This is done especially by the kind of critic reading such novels try to promote by retelling the past registered only under the European colonizers’ perspectives. The written of historical novels in America effectuates, in this way and by its especial renewed trajectory, the conquest of a symbolic and significant space inside the nowadays literary world – a space which Silviano Santiago defined as the “space-in-between”.