Rewriting the

Abstract

This dissertation is a survey of postmodern historical fiction in 20th and 21st century Spanish American literature. It has diverse manifestations, but the defining characteristic of this kind of historical fiction is a rejection of any rigid distinction between historical and fictional discourse. This is a descriptive rather than a normative study: it examines how eight different authors use the techniques of postmodern historical fiction to develop implicit critiques of the “great man” theory of history. The Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle popularized this theory in the 1800s, and it asserts that biography is the proper model for history, namely, the biography of prominent individuals – “great men.” It treats these people as the source of history. Opposing this historiographic ideology, many authors of postmodern historical fiction see such figures as subjects that can be “written” and “re-written”; they are not the source of history, but the product of historical discourse. I conduct close readings of nine primary texts to elucidate how they challenge the “great man” historiography of four significant figures from Spanish American history: Montezuma, Simón Bolívar, Christopher Columbus, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. I conclude that the historiographic critiques in these texts converge around three common strategies in their critiques: an extension of character from the domain of fiction to the domain of history, the subversion of the literary genres of biography and autobiography, and a commitment to rewriting the traditional narratives of specific historical events.