Introduction: The Castle of If

Abstract

The “Château d’If” of Dumas’ novel can describe the divergent tendencies of alternate history: the enclosed space of the historical alternative, which must be marked off from the world by a defensive barrier, and the sense of the present as carceral—a prison cell from which variations of known history can be fabulated. Alternate history is identified as a response to the heterogeneous streams of time (of the planet, the species, and human society) that emerged with the new scientific disciplines of the nineteenth century. I explain the choice of “alternate history” to describe the various practices of imagining history to have been different, and discuss the limited capacity of existing studies of this category to describe its character and proliferation in the period.