Towards a counterfactual criticism: alternate history and the study of English Literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay asks what the study of alternate history can do for broader literary criticism, arguing that reflecting on historical contingency benefits our readings of canonical literature as well as it does our readings of twenty-first century popular fiction. I treat counterfacticity as a critical tool, useful at the level of both volume and sentence. My discussion begins with Elizabeth Gaskell’s unfinished novel Wives and Daughters (1864–66), arguing that the opportunities raised by its openendedness can also be applied to completed novels like Wilkie Collins’s Armadale (1864–66), with which it shared pages in the Cornhill. Noting the role played by the periodical form in this discussion, I then turn to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004), exploring the deliberate instabilities that novel confers on its alternate, magical nineteenth century. In a final, shorter section, I comment on the applications of counterfactual criticism in the classroom, pointing out that the discipline of English Literature has much to gain from a conscious effort to imagine the past having gone differently. The article counters outmoded assumptions regarding the value of popular fiction by arguing that such writings can provide us with new methodological awarenesses in everything that we read.