History is remembering the past and learning from it. In this respect, literary works are an important source, especially for novels. In fact, historical novels are even considered a genre in Turkish literature. The way these sources are processed is also among the topics that are often discussed, and there are even various theories about them. One of these, new historicism, is a theory of criticism that considers all kinds of texts written in the past as its source and reinterprets them. In this context, the author parodies the information he has obtained from history/past by transforming it, that is, by interpreting it. The main purpose of parody is to question reality. What stands out in parody are intertextuality, metafiction and irony. In this study, we examined Orhan Pamuk's novel "Plague Nights", published in 2021, in terms of new historicism theory. We witnessed that the work, which was constructed on a historical basis, contains parodic elements about today. Already in the novel II. It is about a plague epidemic that occurred during the reign of Abdulhamid. In the novel, it is seen that the author occasionally parodies some past events and facts while transferring them to the present. It is understood that this epidemic is especially associated with the recent covid/pandemic. In addition, Pamuk's use of the metafictional method to turn the letters of some historical figures from the past into novels can be seen as an intergenre parody. In this regard, we first tried to identify the elements that reflect the new understanding of historicism in the novel, and also focused on how the author handles these elements, the connections he establishes with the present, and the way he handles them.
Keywords:History/past, Historicism, Post-modernism, Parody, Textuality,metafiction, Irony.