The Shifting Logics of Historical Fiction

Abstract

This chapter evaluates how the antebellum period sees the widespread acceptance of fiction as an important branch of American letters and the increasing ascendance of an understanding of fiction reading as a private leisure activity oriented toward moral and aesthetic self-culture. It focuses on historical fiction, because its enduring popularity allows it to capture a subtle, but significant, transformation in how fiction was discussed, debated, and valued across this period. Historical fiction's important role in the widespread acceptance of fiction in the antebellum United States has been well documented. What has been overlooked is a related shift in how historical fictionality was justified across this period that crystallizes the terms of this wider acceptance. The evolving justifications for historical fiction reveal a gradual but decisive shift in the discourse about fiction, as a set of intertwined aesthetic and moral standards for valuing and evaluating fiction increasingly supplanted the intertwined epistemological and moral questions that had predominated in earlier debates.