Abstract

Drawing upon the philosophical writings of Giambattista Vico and Friedrich Nietzsche as well as Paul Ricoeur's theories of narrative and metaphor, this dissertation examines the philosophies of history expressed in three novels: Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra, Michel Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Beginning with a detailed discussion of the perspectives of Vico, Nietzsche, and Ricoeur, an interpretive framework is developed through which the three novels are analyzed in order to show how Fuentes, Tournier, and Rushdie produce speculative novels that indicate how imagination is the true source of all histories