La documentation historique comme effet de vérité dans le roman contemporain

Abstract

This article examines the citation of historical documents in Les Onze and HHhH, two novels inspired by archival materials, with a first-person narrator who styles himself as a historical expert. The citing of documents should, according to historians, be a mark of the text’s reliability, although in these novels it does not always provoke the desired result. Their respective appropriation of a historical style of writing plays with the reader’s expectations and provokes interrogations as to how best to represent history.