HISTORY, PARAHISTORY, IRONY - SPANISH HISTORICAL NOVEL IN THE POSTMODERN TIME (Historie, parahistorie, ironie - spanelsky historicky roman v dobach postmoderny)

The paper deals with the methods and the strategies used by Spanish authors of the post modern historical novels to relativize the historic Truths. Instead of the proved dogmatic categories, serving as supports of the traditional historical novel for many generations, some authors, as E. Mendoza, J. Eslava Galan or A. Perez-Reverte use original post modern approaches, e.g. the generation of a so-called 'parahistory', an ironical point of view, a tension between the 'classical' form and the 'modern' contents, demythization etc. This is mainly due to their strong scepticism towards the 'great' ideologies presented as recipes for the salvation of the world and mankind. Spanish post modern authors reject the role of the writer as 'the conscience of the nation' and deliberately offer only partial view of the subjective validity. Their efforts result in highly original historical novels in which nothing and nobody are taken quite seriously, yet the texts still maintain a relatively high informative value of the complex and ambiguous human history.