Professional paper
Constructing History and Reconstructing the Self in The Night War Series
Iva Kurtović
orcid.org/0000-0002-4369-7560
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The paper presents a close reading of The Night War, an unfinished series
of Captain America fanfiction, through the lens of Linda Hutcheon’s discussions
of historiographic metafiction. The Night War series presents an alternate version
of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in which Captain America’s best friend Bucky
Barnes had kept a journal while he was a soldier in wwii, and the posthumously
published diary became a literary classic. The paper examines the series’
structural aspects, most notably the fact that it is written entirely in the form of
a classic war memoir, with detailed footnotes for both (fan)fictional and actual
historical events. Thus, The Night War continuously draws the readers out of a
highly verisimilitudinous piece of writing and explicitly points to its own artificiality.
The metafictional nature of the series comes to the fore in one of the series’
sequels, in which the authors’ growing thematic insistence on the unreliability
of historical narratives is realized through an audio-sequel. Therefore, The Night
War series also exemplifies a transmedia story, one in which an entire alternate
universe is created to discuss the ideas of history, memory, the self – and the
inherent instability of these very categories. The paper seeks to contextualize
these narrative interventions by analysing The Night War both as a piece of
fanfiction and as an example of historiographic metafiction.
Keywords
historiographic metafiction, fanfiction, alternate history, Captain America, transmedia storytelling
Hrčak ID:
255694
URI
Publication date:
13.4.2021.
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