Suchergebnisse

This volume is the first study of the extensive influence of Roman law on the first written law of Iceland, as transmitted through Byzantium. Starting with a chronological presentation of the legislation during the period of the Icelandic free state (930-1262/4), the character of the chieftain Hafliði Másson is presented in detail. Through him influences from Roman law, as well as norms from the Old Testament played a part in the legal codex of Grágás drawn up in 1117/1118. The volume is thus of significance not just for legal history, but also for German and Byzantine studies. Hans Henning Hoff, Hamburg.

The ambiguity between reality and fiction haunts Einar Már Guðmundsson's novel Hundadagar (Dog Days, 2015), as it is a fictional narrative about factual, historical figures and events, such as Jörgen Jörgensen, Rev. Jón Steingrímsson, Finnur Magnússon and Guðrún Johnsen, while the same can be said about many other novels labeled as postmodernism. Canadian literary scholar Linda Hutcheon coined the concept of historiographic metafiction to describe fictions as such, which are "intensely self-reflexive", while "paradoxically lay claim to historical events and personages". Hutcheon suggests that historiographic metafictions fully illuminate the very way in which postmodernism entangles itself with both the epistemological and ontological status of history. This paper begins with an introduction to Hutcheon's theoretical contributions on postmodernism, postmodern literature and the relationship between history and fiction, followed by a reading of Hundadagar as a historiographic metafiction. The narrator's strategies—such as parataxis, metanarrative comments, we-narrative discourse and documentary intertext—largely indicate an imitation, a revelation, or say, a parody of the process of historian's writings. The paper further suggests that it is the Icelandic financial crisis in 2008 that prompts the narrator to revisit the 18. and 19. century, since the financial crisis takes the role of a rupture of the Enlightenment ideals, leading to disorder and chaos. Moreover, the narrator finds an uncanny similarity between the past and the present, as if the history has been repeating itself. The spectre of history keeps (re)appearing in a deferred temporality. While revisiting the past, the narrator also (re)visits the present in an allegorical way. In a word, as a historiographic metafiction, Einar Már Guðmundsson's Hundadagar is "fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political", just as Hutcheon's perception of postmodernism.