CITY OF BROKEN PROMISES ENQUANTO ROMANCE HISTÓRICO關於歷史小說《絕望之城》
The article analyzes how Austin Coates's historical novel *City of Broken Promises* (1967) represents **eighteenth-century Macau** as a “novel of broken promises,” discussing its necessarily hybrid nature between History and fiction. Starting from a theoretical problematization of the subgenre—cente...
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| Published in: | Review of Culture |
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| Format: | Articles |
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Instituto Cultural de Macau
January 2008
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| Online Access: | https://www.icm.gov.mo/rc/viewer/pdfViewerParts/40025/3670 |
| Summary: | The article analyzes how Austin Coates's historical novel *City of Broken Promises* (1967) represents **eighteenth-century Macau** as a “novel of broken promises,” discussing its necessarily hybrid nature between History and fiction. Starting from a theoretical problematization of the subgenre—centered on the tension between verifiable extratextual referents and the freedom of “fictionalization” of human life in historical context—the author confronts narratological models of the historical novel that privilege the consciousness of the past, the temporal construction of narrativity, and the “symbolic truth” of fiction. Methodologically, the reading of **CBP** emphasizes how the plot mobilizes specific spatiotemporal coordinates and how the characterization of figures with recoverable names and biographical traits does not aim to reproduce historical persons accurately, but rather to reconfigure them literarily. The article concludes that the novel’s effectiveness lies not in serving as a substitute for historiography, but in producing an interpretive model of the past, in which history is made available as a narrative horizon for understanding “man in history.” Thus, **CBP** demonstrates how the truth of the historical novel is less factual than structural and symbolic: what is “said” about the past depends on the poetics that makes it narratable. |
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| ISSN: | 1682-1106 |