PASTIM Imaginary pasts: literary and media representations of historical periods in contemporary popular fiction – PASSIM

The PASTIM project (Imaginary pasts: literary and media representations of historical periods in contemporary popular fiction), led by Anne Besson, full professor in comparative literature, aims to describe and interrogate the cultural representations associated with major historical periods, by studying contemporary popular fictions (novels and graphic narratives, cinema and TV series, role-playing games and video games) in English and French (or translated in these languages), widely distributed and shared. Examples taken from the last decades will be observed in the light of earlier representations by our contemporaneity inherits and reworks, for instance by taking into account the now-prevalent culturalist perspectives. Beyond Middles Ages, a period whose reinvestment is better known, object of the medievalism studies, PASTIM wants to broaden the understanding to other historical eras, to fill gaps in our knowledge, very heterogeneous in its volume and precision depending on the period considered, and to produce syntheses enabling problematized comparisons.
Three associated teams (classical reception studies ; XVI-XVIIIth centuries ; neo-victorian and other fictions of the XIXth century – but thoses names can’t be the same in French and English !), will bring together specialists in literature, media and other disciplines (history, socio-anthropology, SIC). They will each produce over the course of the project a major reference book, an illustrated dictionary of imaginary representations of each period. Digital and/or physical exhibitions, are also planned. At the same time, the medievalist team, will organize cross-disciplinary symposiums on key theoretical issues: historical periodizations and imaginary synchronies; lexicon and productivities of tropes; the relationship between past, history and memory.