Historiocentric novel: formulating the definition

This article is devoted to the study of the genre variety of modern historical prose. It is argued, that among the many subgenres (historiographic metafiction, historiosophical novel, alternative historical novel) of the modern historical novel, there is a historiocentric novel, the problems of which are determined by the vector of the author’s reflections on the historical fate of the nation. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the presence in the latest literature of a special kind of historical novel, which we call a historiocentric novel, and to reveal its genre specificity. The methodology for solving this goal is synthetic. The methods on which the research is carried out include comparative-historical, historical-cultural, as well as the approaches of modern hermeneutic theory. The material for this analysis was the novel “Neue Mitte” by the modern German prose writer Jochen Schimmang. In the course of this study, it is proved that the idea of history in a historiocentric novel, which arose under the influence of the ideas of the philosophy of historycentrism, is embodied in a work of art not through the depiction of historical events, but through a system of historical and cultural allusions to national history. In addition, the novel “Neue Mitte” by J. Schimmang reveals the intention of solving the posed historical problem. The results of this analysis not only allow us to highlight the features of the literary process in Germany in the 20th - 21st centuries, but also to outline the prospects for further research, in particular, the expansion of the corpus of texts suitable for this genre nomination.