Witnessing the History of a Massacre as Literary Theme and Strategy in the Graphic Novel 'Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre' (2019)

Abstract

This article analyses how the use of history, as an ideological and textual narrative, becomes a literary theme and strategy in the realist graphic novel Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre, published collectively in 2019 by the historian Robert Poole, author of the recent study Peterloo: The English Uprising (Oxford University Press), also based in 400 contemporary written testimonies, and by the artists Eva Schlunke and Polyp. We also study how the novel mainly consists of images fictionalized from historical sources and quotations of those same historic narratives which allow the reader to create the illusion of direct contact with the textualized past through the illustrations that also function as autonomous and alternative narratives.