Gorji: Poor data wrecks history novels
23 January 2012
Talking about history novels, history researcher Zahir Siamian Gorji says the most significant matter of history novels is holding poor information about real past events and characters."
He said:" History novels recreate the reality however literary texts which are a branch of novels intend to look at the past. In stories imagination is included and the existence of the incident in the past makes no difference for the author of history novels."
Gorji added:" History and literature have always enjoyed a specific relationship and history texts were mostly written in literary styles."
He then talked about the similarities of history texts and novels saying first are the author's imagination, then their narrating style and finally recreating the past.
He then said that in historical texts the data and information is based on documentations and evidences but in history novels the writer tries to describe every thing real.
He added that if the author's imagination is accompanied with a criticizing point of view, then the fictional elements can be correctly used for writing history novels.
Number of Visits: 5460
The latest
Most visited
- Oral history News for Mordad 1405 (July 23rd to August 22nd 2026)
- The Third Regiment: Memoirs of an Iraqi Prisoner of War - 45
- 374th Night of Remembrance - 2
- War Health
- 100 Questions/ 45
- Memoirs of Behzad Rastegari
- Theory Six: The Inevitability of Perspective
- The Third Regiment: Memoirs of an Iraqi Prisoner of War - 46
Documentary Pathology of the US Embassy Documents
The Necessity of Scientific Rereading and Content Analysis of DocumentsMore than four decades have passed since the publication of the first collections of documents from the US Embassy in Tehran. However, despite the relatively easy access to this treasure trove of documents, systematic research exploitation of it has not been adequate. We still do not have a “comprehensive picture” of the content of these 11,000 documents.
100 Questions / 42
What is the importance of the narrator and interviewers shared understanding of the past in oral history?We asked several researchers and activists in the field of oral history to express their views on oral history questions. The names of each participant are listed at the beginning of their answers, and the text of all the answers will be published on this portal by the end of the week.
Validation: Challenges and Necessities
Where does truth stand in oral history? How can the correctness of a narrative be recognized? Does fact-checking matter? If there is exaggeration in the reporting of some accounts, how can it be detected? Is it possible to record an event accurately through the recording of a narrative? Readers and users of oral history works are often faced with these questions, and sometimes encounter doubts about some oral history works.From Revolutionary Circles to the Military Arm of the Islamic Government
In those days, it became clear that certain institutions had to be established very quickly—institutions suited to the temperament, expectations, and lingering aspirations of the younger generation; young people who had been politically active before the Revolution and, in some cases, had been directly entangled in arrests, imprisonment, ...
