INTRODUCTION

In his study The Historical Novel (1936-1937) the Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic György Lukács has described the genesis of a new historical awareness, making its appearance at the end of the 18th century:

Shortly afterwards a new genre, the historical novel, likewise cropped up on the European as well as the American scene. The founding father of this trend is Sir Walter Scott, for according to Lukács, “[w]hat is lacking in the so-called historical novel before Sir Walter Scott is precisely the specifically historical, that is, derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age” (15). Since the early 19th century, however, the historical novel as a genre has undergone profound changes, and it may be stated that during the last 40 or 50 years this literary form has quite often found a local habitation and a name within a much more comprehensive, intertextually cross-fertilized space, where earlier texts and whole networks of subtle – or occasionally not so subtle – references have begun to play a more or less important role.

The notion of intertextuality was coined in the 1960s (by Julia Kristeva), and it has since then been widely used in (post)modern literary theory – where the influence of the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin's theoretical approach to concepts such as the dialogical imagination and the polyphonic novel appears to be almost omnipresent within the academic field, and Bakhtin is also the explicit source of inspiration behind Kristeva's initial conceptualization of the term intertextuality.

It is, however, also possible to establish a link to another key-term in recent – poststructuralist and/or postcolonial – theory, i.e. to the notion of multiculturalism: a term that has been taken up, for instance, by African American as well as Native American writers and/ or theorists.