allohistorical

English

WOTD – 7 March 2022

Etymology

From allo- (prefix meaning ‘different, other’) +‎ historical.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /alə(ʊ)ˌhɪˈstɒɹɪkəl/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /æləˌhɪˈstɔːɹɪkəl/, /æloʊ-/

• Audio (General American):

  (file)

• Hyphenation: al‧lo‧his‧tor‧ic‧al

Adjective

allohistorical (not comparable)

1. (narratology) Relating to alternate history, either as a discipline or genre, or as a specific counterfactual sequence of events.
   • 2005, Gavriel D[avid] Rosenfeld, “Germany’s Wartime Triumph: From Dystopia to Normalcy”, in The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, part I (The Nazis Win World War II), page 182:

     If [Alexander] Demandt's essay served as a strident example of the German desire for normalcy, a more subtle example was provided by a brief allohistorical depiction of a Nazi victory in World War II written by German historian Michael Salewski in 1999.

   • 2014, Robert von Dassanowsky, “Dr. ‘King’ Schultz as Ideologue and Emblem: The German Enlightenment and the Legacy of the 1848 Revolutions in Django Unchained”, in Oliver C. Speck, editor, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, New York, N.Y., London: Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, part 1 (Cultural Roots and Intertexts: Germany, France, and the United States), page 25:

     Thus Django becomes the carrier of the “public use of one's reason”—the Kantian road to enlightenment given to him by the German “Forty-Eighter” dentist–turned-bounty hunter Dr. “King” Schultz, and represents the fictive, allohistorical beginning of the battle against slavery and racism in the United States.

   • 2014, David Malcolm, “The Great War Re-remembered: Allohistory and Allohistorical Fiction”, in Martin Löschnigg, Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz, editors, The Great War in Post-memory Literature and Film, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 173:

     The question of the plausibility of the counter-factual is seen as key in all three discussions of allohistorical fiction (as it is in [Alexander] Demandt's and [Niall] Ferguson's examinations of allohistory) […].

Related terms

• allohistory

Translations

relating to alternate history

• Spanish: alohistórico

Further reading

• alternate history on Wikipedia.Wikipedia