History and Story: Unconventional History in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and James A. Michener's Tales of the South Pacific

"Literary history" is a cross between conventional (scientific) history and pure fiction. The resulting hybrid provides access to history that the more conventional sort does not (in particular, a sense of the experiences of the historical actors, and the human meaning of historical events). This claim is demonstrated by an analysis of two novels about World War II, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, and Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener. These two very different novels in English are by writers themselves very different from each other, writers from different times, different social and political backgrounds, and different points of view. Their novels examine the effects of the Second World War and the events of 1942 on the human psyche, and suggest how human beings have always searched for the silver lining despite the devastation and devaluation of values. Both novels resist any kind of preaching, and yet the search for peace, balance, and kindness is constantly highlighted. The facts of scientific history are woven into the loom of their unconventional histories. The sense of infirmity created by the formal barriers of traditional history is eased, and new possibilities for historical understanding are unveiled.     

Review Article: Discovering New Americas

DAVID E. STANNARD. American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xv, 358. $36.50 (CDN)

ANTHONY GRAFTON, APRIL SHELFORD, and NANCY SIRAISI. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Pp. x, 282. $29.95 (US)

VALERIE I. J. FLINT. The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Pp. xx, 233. $24.95 (US)

DJELAL KADIR. Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe's Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Pp. xiv, 256. $30.00 (us).     

James Joyce: steps towards a diagnosis

Authors whose scholarship is in the golden realm of English literature have not hesitated to make pronouncements on James Joyce's health. A publication in this genre claims he had tabes dorsalis. One feels that an authoritative comment, accepting or rejecting a diagnosis of neurosyphilis, should be provided by the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences.