Call for papers for the Special Issue ''History and fiction: hybridity and reflexivity''

This special issue discusses the relationship between history and fiction and the different historical configurations of this relationship     .  It invites contributions that interrogate      the intersections between historical and fictional discourses, how these relationships have changed historically, as well as the specific foundations of each of these fields and the ways in which they differentiate from one another. The relationship and specificities of historical and fictional discourses are, par excellence, a modern and contemporary problem. It was first raised during the 18^th and 19^th centuries when      the definition of a scientific status for history and the search for a proper status for fiction defined the separation between the two fields. However, since the 1970s, the Theory of History and the Theory of Literature - through authors such as Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, Catherine Gallagher, Linda Hutcheon - and also modernist and postmodernist literature - have problematized this separation and focused on what these genres have in common: their conventionalized, intertextual linguistic structures that mobilize rhetorical devices for the representations of reality. More recently, the question about the boundaries between history and fiction has gained new theoretical momentum in light of debates on memory, post-colonial and decolonial perspectives, and the rise of literary works marked by formal hybridity between historical and fictional elements. In this context, this dossier aims to explore the general theme of history and fiction from a more specific angle: focusing on works characterized by the hybridity of literary forms and genres, self-reflexivity, and new performances of the fictional. This approach seeks to engage and contribute to contemporary debates on the status of historical knowledge. This debate informs diverse authors including Hans Gumbrecht (1926: Living on the Edge of Time, 1997), Ivan Jablonka (Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes, 2016), and Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The new mestiza, 1987), all of whom develop self-reflexive historiographical constructs to reinterpret the conditions of possibility for the representation of reality. In turn, literary works such as those by Silviano Santiago (Em Liberdade, 2011), Felipe Charbel (Saia da frente do meu sol, 2023) or Octavia Butler (Kindred, 1979) have performed the conditions of possibility for fictionalizing historical reality and its (un)hopes, through historiographical and fictional hybridisms. These works, strictly speaking, are just a few examples of experiments with formally hybrid and self-reflexive writing, as well as with contemporary performances of the fictional. More than anything, they indicate how history and fiction have creatively, hybridly and reflexively fueled debates on the status of historical reality, whether in an epistemological sense (for example, in exploring the relationship between truth and its opposites - error, lies and the fictional), or in an ethical sense (through representations of historically sensitive events and/or silenced characters), or even in political sense (through narrative forms used to represent experiences of revolt and/or resignation, apathy and/or indignation, violence and/or freedom). Therefore this special issue welcomes contributions that explore theoretical and methodological aspects of literary and historiographical works marked by self-reflexivity, formal hybridity and/or contemporary fictional performances. It also invites articles that explore the relationship between history and fiction, particularly in its hybrid and self-reflexive dimensions. These analyses should consider specific historiographical and fictional works not merely as illustrations of pre-established theories, but as sources of innovative thinking. The goal should be to expand and renew theoretical imagination, avoiding the mechanical application of concepts. Finally, we also welcome contributions that approach the issues and themes proposed here from an interdisciplinary perspective, exploring areas related to the History of Historiography, such as Historical Theory, Aesthetics, Critical Theory, Literature Theory, Literary Anthropology, among others.