Klappentext

In the second edition of The Historical Novel, Jerome de Groot expertly charts the evolution of one of literature's most beloved and complex forms. From its eighteenth-century origins to postmodern and contemporary historical fiction, de Groot reveals how historical fiction continues to challenge, provoke, and transform our understanding of the past.

The new edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded with global perspectives and new emphasis on the role and importance of female writers throughout. Readers will discover fresh insights on:

• different genres, such as sensational or 'low' fiction, crime novels, literary works, counterfactual writing and related issues of audience, value, and authenticity;
• the many functions of historical fiction, particularly the challenges it poses to accepted histories and postmodern questioning of 'grand narratives';
• the relationship of the historical novel to the wider cultural sphere with reference to historical theory, the internet, television, and film;
• key theoretical concepts such as the authentic fallacy, postcolonialism, Marxism, Neo-Victorian approaches, critical race theory, queer and feminist reading;

• works which diversify our understanding of the form and reflect an increasing sense that the writer should be understood as intervening in historical debates-including the work of Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Townsend Warner, W.G. Sebald, Chinua Achebe, Sarah Waters, Amitav Ghosh, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy. Drawing on a wide range of examples from across the centuries and around the globe, the second edition of The Historical Novel is essential reading for exploring the rich intersection where history meets fiction-a creative borderland where the past continues to be reimagined.

  Inhalt

  Series Editor's Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Historical Novel NOW

Chapter 1 Early Manifestations and Some Definitions

Jane Porter and Maria Edgeworth

Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels

Theoretical Paradigms: Franco Moretti and Distant Reading

Chapter 2: Developments and expansion

Novelist as Theorist: Alessandro Manzoni

Mary Shelley: romance and temporal experiment

History, theory, popularity

Charlotte Brönte's experimentation

Novelist as Theorist: George Eliot and realism

The historical novel in America

African American historical novels

Huckleberry Finn, race, and history

Novelist as Theorist: Leo Tolstoy

Chapter 3: Into the Twentieth Century

Theories of the Historical Novel During the Twentieth Century

Theoretical Paradigms: Georg Lukács

Modernism and The End-Of-History Novel

Novelist as theorist: Sylvia Townsend Warner

Chapter 4: Through the century: Romance and Postmodernism

Historical romance

Theoretical Paradigms: Diana Wallace

Postmodernism and Metafiction

Theoretical Paradigms: Linda Hutcheon

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose and Detective Fiction

'Tap-Dancing on the Edge of the Abyss': Problematising Postmodernism Through History

Chapter 5: History from the mid-1990s and the post-2000 boom

Novelist as Theorist: Hilary Mantel

New apparatuses and support mechanisms for historical fictions

New and expanded genres

Crime Fiction

Fantasy and alternative histories

Writing the immediate past and the art of simultaneity

Rewriting: revision and parody

The Neo-Victorian, and the Neo-Historical

Novelist as Theorist: W.G. Sebald

Chapter 6: Undoing History

Conservative Historical Fiction

Reclaiming Black and Indigenous histories in America

Novelist as Theorist: Toni Morrison

Reclaiming narratives and rewriting the past

Challenging colonial temporality

Senegalese historical fiction

Novelist as Theorist: Chinua Achebe and anti-colonial writing

Rewriting the past

Theoretical Paradigms: Trauma Theory

New genealogies and roots

Magical Realism and History

Sexual and Gender Diversity in/ and historical novels

Novelist as Theorist: Sarah Waters

Theoretical paradigms: Trans

Climate Emergency and Climate Fiction

Novelist as Theorist: Amitav Ghosh

Appendix: Ways of approaching an historical novel

Bibliography

Index