INY LORENTZ’S WANDERING HERO – AN UNCANNY NARRATIVE RESEMBLANCE

Rezumat

This century has seen a resurgence of historical fantasy novels, but few works have come as close to Walter Scott’s historical novel as Iny Lorentz’s books, at least when it comes to narrative technique and selling numbers. There was a period when the public couldn’t access their books, on account of the language barrier, but translations have been published and their success with “Marie, the Wandering Harlot, Series” rivals Ken Follett’s Kingsbridge Series and Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma novels. They managed to eclipse even Rebecca Gable’s success with Fortune’s Wheel. The reader gets copious endnotes, an insight into the “real” historical events which served as a source of inspiration and research prior to the writing, as well as explanations for various local traditions. A central common denominator uniting the Iny Lorentz’s novels with the ancestors of historical novels (Edgeworth and Scott) is the presence of wandering characters. It is our claim that transformations the wandering hero undergoes – a type of hero who plays a central role in both Scott and Lorentz – are rather caused by Lorentz’s narrative style, which injects narrative features pertaining to women writers into the agglomeration of incident specific to a historical novel, rather than by postmodernist precritical assumptions behind the narratorial voice. Otherwise, far from offering a marginal voice and a “petite histoire” (like Ginzburg’s Il formaggio e i vermi), these characters reinforce the dominant set of values and hierarchies and provide a way out of the political/social problems in the fictional/historical societies depicted.