CALL FOR PAPERS REVISTA DE LITERATURA, HISTÓRIA E MEMÓRIA V. 22, N. 39, 2026

The Journal of Literature, History, and Memory, ISSN 1983-1498, Qualis B1, linked to the Postgraduate Program in Letters at the Western Paraná State University (UNIOESTE), published biannually, is accepting submissions of original and unpublished papers for its next edition (v. 22, n. 39, 2026).

 

Dossier: Literature and history: similarities and differences

             

The representation of history through fiction is established on many levels as a rescue of the past and a dialogue between art and society. This process highlights a theoretical understanding that involves limits, similarities, and differences, both in terms of the possible contribution that literature, in its fictional and poetic forms, brings to the knowledge and understanding of history, and in terms of history’s contribution to the development of art.

Considering borders and margins as natural landmarks between fields of knowledge, in the relationship between literature and history they are above all symbolic due to literature’s capacity of reimagining reality, creating a play of representations that acts in the construction of a hybrid object, sometimes approximating and sometimes distancing the view of events and discourse surrounding them (Pesavento, 2001).

Literature is an “inseparable part of culture cannot be understood outside the total context of an entire culture of given epoch” (Bakhtin, 2003, p. 360). This understanding cannot be restricted only to the present or the recent past, it must reach other moments in history from a synchronic perspective. Through such perspective, literature becomes a relevant source which, by taking history as the theme of literary representation, brings to life a way of living and understanding society at a given moment, establishing a record of events and the transformation of societies.

Just as literary studies cannot do without the direct contribution of the social sciences, history can also find in literature an enriching analytical perspective for its reflection on human experience (Sevcenko, 2003). The analytical horizon that opens up reaches historians such as Michel de Certeau (2022, p. 68) in his statement about the historian's action, that he “can transform into culture the elements he extracts from natural fields [...] he proceeds to a displacement of the nature/culture articulation” or, from another perspective, the understanding of history as narrative adopted by Hayden White in Tropics of Discourse, which takes it as a ”verbal artifact."

The contributions of these theorists, among others, highlight the accuracy of literary studies supported by their relationship with history. In this sense, the proposal for this dossier is to bring together studies that indicate the extent to which the presence of history can be felt in fiction, as a synchronic and/or geographical map of a particular moment or sociocultural group. The delimited preference mainly covers Brazilian history and novels, but can also be extended to poetry and be extended to the Latin American continent.

 

References

BAKHTIN, Mikhail. Estética da criação verbal, 4.ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003.

DE CERTEAU, Michel. A escrita da história. 3. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Forense, 2022.

PESAVENTO, Sandra Jatahy. Fronteiras do milênio. Porto Alegre: Ed. Universidade/UFRGS. 2001.

SEVCENKO, Nicolau. Literatura como missão: tensões sociais e criação cultural na Primeira República. 2. ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2003.

WHITE, Hayden. Trópicos do discurso. Ensaios sobre a crítica da cultura. São Paulo, Edusp, 1994.

 

Organization: José Carlos da Costa (Unioeste) and André Luiz Leme (Unioeste)

Submissions: until February 28, 2026.