Is there truth in fiction? – a discussion with John Updike’s Rabbit redux novel

Abstract

This article discusses the possibilities of knowledge about the history provided by the historiographic and literary discourses. Of gigantic proportions, the subject has obviously been approached from a delimited point of view. At first, we try to point out some problems of use fictional writing as having document status, occasion to criticize the use of literature as a source of knowledge in the same sense in which history uses documents to make statements about the past. Then, after an eye on the historiographical discussion itself, it is proposed a possibility of knowledge from the literature, in view of John Updike's novel.