Great Men and the Civil War: New Historical Fiction

Abstract

Facts mean nothing in historical fiction without a hearty and successful effort at conjuring the soul of a narrative's bygone people and events. The story in history comes to the fore?the best works weaving their period details into memorable tales possessed of compelling characters and circumstances, often at the outright expense of generally accepted historical facts. This is all true, proclaims the lively narrator at the beginning of David Madden s Civil War novel Sharpshooter (1997), except for the lies that come naturally when you tell your own It remains that most readers are willing to forgive any number of falsities so long as they advance and deepen the story. Historical novelists overly enamored of their research run the risk of com ing across as boastfully archaic and quaint, while those who throw research to the wind can be irritatingly contemporary in both substance and tone. The dilemmas of the writer of historical fiction are not easily resolvable. How does one make accessible the world and thoughts of a character whose speech and associations most readers would not understand if faithfully related accord ing to that character's culture and time? How does one portray our ances tors, upon whom readers naturally impress their own twenty-first century ideas and beliefs, and convincingly present their inherent alienness without alienating the reader? The potential answers are as difficult as the questions, perhaps more so, a conundrum which makes historical fiction a challenging genre to work in if one takes it seriously and seeks to do something more than array the contemporary world in strange accents and funny clothes. The uneasy association between readership considerations and period verisimili tude remains a risky business?a tightrope walk?in terms of relative degree; but the writer of historical fiction must, to some extent, agree to bring the contemporary reader along in terms of the imagined world at hand if its complexities are to be approached at all.