Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
The Historical Fictions Research Network 2025 Online Summer Workshop: Transnational and Postnational Historical Fictions, Exeter, İngiltere, 13 Haziran 2025, ss.4-5, (Özet Bildiri)
The aim of this paper is to explore Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) as a radical challenge to the national frameworks of historical fiction as theorized by Georg Lukács and his successors. While Lukács associates the historical novel with the emergence of national consciousness, Woolf presents a transhistorical and transnational narrative that resists the gendered, linear, and realist conventions of the genre. As Diana Wallace argues, the dominant tradition of historical fiction has systematically excluded women’s contributions, particularly those that reimagine history outside of patriarchal and nationalist models. Orlando offers precisely such a reimagining, combining biography, fantasy, fiction, and satire to construct a fluid and ironic relationship to history. By tracing Orlando’s journey across centuries and borders, from Elizabethan England to Ottoman Constantinople and back to modern London, Woolf displaces the nation as the primary frame of historical experience. Constantinople, in particular, functions as a liminal, transformative space where fixed identities (national, gendered, historical) dissolve and new possibilities emerge. Thus, Orlando foregrounds the non-national in historical fiction, not only as a setting but as a method, a way of telling history that is fluid and deeply resistant to the teleologies of national progress. This paper argues that Orlando offers a feminist alternative to dominant historical narratives by embracing multiplicity, fluidity, and imagination.