Amitav Ghosh: History Against Fiction

ABSTRACT

This article focuses how Amitav Ghosh uses history against fiction and how he represents reality against fiction. In the nineteenth century, literature and history were considered branches of the same tree of learning, a tree which sought to interpret experience for the purpose of guiding and elevating man. Then came the separation that resulted in the distinct disciplines of literary and historical studies today, despite the fact that the realist novel shared many similar beliefs about the possibility of writing factually about observable reality. Fiction about history is called historiographic metafiction. This article eplains how Amitav Ghosh uses history with in fiction in the novel The Hungry Tide.

Key Words - Post Modern, Histriography, Meta fiction, History.

INTRODUCTION

Historiographic metafiction is passionate by history; it is concerned with historical

Historiographic metafiction according to Hutcheon displays both “ a world of fiction … self–consciously presented as a constructed one and also a world of public experience” (poetics 6).She also defines histriographic metafiction as a sphere that challenges ideas such as historical truth and precise knowledge of the past;

Historiographic metafiction refutes the natural or common sense methods of distinguishing between historical fact or fiction. It refuses the view that only history has a truth claim, both by questioning the ground of that claim in historiography and by asserting that both history and fiction are discourses, human constructs, signifying systems, and both derive their major claim to truth from that identity ( poetics 93