Zvanična i individualna istorija u romanu Deca ponoći Salmana Ruždija

Abstract

Although it had been tackled since ancient times, the complex relation between history and fiction was not seriously problematized until the emergence of postmodernism in the second half of the twentieth century. One of the most significant literary works which contains all the important elements of the genre of historiographic metafiction defined by Linda Hutcheon in her famous work A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) is undoubtedly Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie. This paper provides a short analysis of Rushdie’s novel, based on the most notable theoretical perspectives concerned with the problem of literary truth and the boundaries between historical and fictional discourse in postmodern fiction. The primary objective of the analysis is the way in which Rushdie’s novel problematizes the existence of multiple histories, i.e. the official version of historical truth and its individual versions.