Fictitious Histories: The Dilemma of Fact and Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel

Abstract

The article takes up the issue of how fiction and history relate to one another. In many respects, the nineteenth century revealed its uncertainties concerning its place in history through the historical novel. This genre, which emerged in modern form at the beginning of the nineteenth century with Walter Scott, was the meeting point of these two distinct disciplines. Although initially a product of the Enlightenment, the historical novel influenced the development of Romanticism and was in turn transformed by it. Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposiadmirably illustrates this process. For a time history and the historical novel developed in a parallel fashion, until the complexity of source materials in the former drove the latter into crisis by the 1850s and 1860s, and forced leading novelists to explore new methods of approaching their historical subject matter. Gustave Flaubert and George Eliot moved beyond the realist novel, then at its height, towards symbolism in the search for fresh modes of expression for their perspective on history. Flaubert's Salammbôand Eliot's Romola, both of which received harsh criticism, are discussed as exemplary texts for the understanding of the dilemmas posed by the writing of historical novels. The historical novel still remained vibrant after the 1860s, as the fictional examination of political transformation in Spain by Benito Pérez Galdós demonstrates. Yet in this writer, too, the tension between fact and imagination remained uppermost.