Contemporary Historical Fiction Research Articles

Introduction—Historical Fiction and the 1960s: Mediating the Past and Reimagining the Future

Abstract This introduction to the special issue on contemporary ethnic historical fiction considers recent trends in the field, as well as the critical history of this popular genre. Over the last two decades, historical fiction, particularly by writers of color, has gone mainstream, gaining large audiences as well as critical admiration. These works challenge the conservatism of the genre, both formally and thematically. Combining historical research with speculative elements, these works tell new stories about US history, centering on the lives of those too often sidelined or ignored in mainstream version of American history and in literary fiction. These various formal and thematic features suggest a distinctive generational moment, shaped by the nation's changing demographics and shifting political conditions. Contemporary ethnic American historical novelists focus simultaneously on the past and the present, bringing current preoccupations—such as the omnipresence of white supremacy, the unresolved trauma of war, and the demonization of refugees and immigrants—to light through their detailed re-creation and reimagining of historical events. In this way, contemporary ethnic American historical fiction operates as a means of representing, and attempting to work through, national traumas.

Contemporary Historical Fiction and Kate Grenville's A Room Made of Leaves

Contemporary Historical Fiction and Kate Grenville's A Room Made of Leaves

Wybrana. O powieści Ewy Stachniak „Bogini tańca”

The article is review on the latest book by Ewa Stachniak, “The Chosen Maiden”. It is a fictionalised biography belonging to more and more popular feminocentric trend of the contemporary historical fiction. Stachniak based on the life of ballet dancer-choreographer Bronislawa Nijinska, sister of Vaslav Nijinsky. Having done much research, she convincingly articulates what she imagines to be the workings of Bronia’s mind, her passion and conviction as an artist, and her ability to endure privates tragedies.

“I Stand Out Like a Raven”: Depicting the Female Detective and Tudor History in Nancy Bilyeau’s The Crown

Abstract This article examines the portrayal of female identity and crime in the Tudor period in Nancy Bilyeau’s contemporary historical crime fiction novel, The Crown (2012). Featuring a female detective figure, Joanna Stafford, Bilyeau’s novel forms part of the wealth of contemporary fiction using Tudor history as context, reflecting a continued interest in and fascination with this period and its prominent figures. This article examines Bilyeau’s representation of the Tudor period in The Crown through the depiction of English society and culture from a contemporary perspective, employing genre fiction in order to highlight issues of criminality. My investigation of The Crown as crime fiction specifically involves analysing gender-political questions and their portrayal within the novel and its tumultuous historical context. This investigation furthermore explores the depiction of agency, individuality, religion, and politics. The article concludes that Bilyeau’s suspense-filled novel provides an imaginative representation of Tudor history through the prism of the crime fiction genre. Central to this project is its employment of a resourceful and complex female detective figure at the heart of the narrative.

‘Part of the project of that book was not to be authentic’: neo-historical authenticity and its anachronisms in contemporary historical fiction

A redefinition of ‘authenticity’ is occurring in historical fiction, with the emergence of a ‘neo-historical’ aesthetic. Wider cultural discourses around authenticity are particularly unstable as evidenced by the renegotiation of the term through social media movements such as Instagram’s #liveauthentic community. The neo-historical impulse in fiction participates in these debates. Whereas in much historical fiction criticism the term ‘authentic’ has been synonymous with ‘accurate’ – witness the quotation from Sarah Waters in my title – the neo-historical aesthetic is differently authentic. This is evident in the use of conspicuous anachronisms through which the neo-historical both resists and incorporates postmodern discourses about the unreliability of ‘factual’ historical narratives, proposing instead new kinds of fictional histories, which are authentic in their self-awareness and honest acknowledgement of their inevitable limitations. With reference to #liveauthentic, this paper will explore the neo-historical aesthetic in novels by Emma Donoghue and Sarah Waters and historical fiction criticism from Diana Wallace and Marie-Luise Kohlke. Underpinning these debates are semiotic theories by Jonathan Culler about authenticity and tourism which illuminate the conditions of ‘authenticity’ and clarify ongoing shifts in its meaning. Rather than deconstructing all history neo-historical aesthetics use the politics and practices of deconstruction and shift the semiotic markers of authenticity to create new, fictionalised ‘neo-histories’.

Representing and accounting for the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews in contemporary Spanish historical fiction

ABSTRACTThe expulsion of the Jews from the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1492 by Isabel I of Castile and Fernando II of Aragon is an event from Spain’s mediaeval past that continues to stimulate scholarly controversy. It is one of the most sensitive issues in Spanish historiography, alongside the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). This paper examines the portrayal of the expulsion in four Spanish historical novels published around the turn of the millennium that narrate the events from the perspective of Jews and conversos. It asks how the events of the expulsion have been reinterpreted in fiction to incorporate the perspective of the victims, particularly in light of the changing historiography after Spain’s transition to democracy in the early 1980s and the commemorations of 1992 (the 500th anniversary of the expulsion) which stimulated interest in Spain’s tricultural past. The essay looks particularly at how writers of historical fiction represent and account for the expulsion of the Jews, and examines the contribution these novels make to the reintegration of the memory of this group into the Spanish collective memory.

Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play: Narrative, detection, history

Morality Play is a historical detective novel set in the late fourteenth century and published in 1995, at a time of flourishing for historical fiction in Britain. This article argues that the novel shares some of the features of contemporary British historical fiction (notably, a degree of self-referentiality and a concern with the relationship between reality and representation), but also retains more traditional historical novels’ desire to show the fate of individuals caught at moments of historical change. Using White’s reflections on forms of historical writing and an understanding of the history of detective fiction, the article brings this currently under-examined text to critical attention and, in so doing, contributes to current scholarly understanding of the so-called ‘historical turn’ in late-twentieth century British fiction.

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015

Annual Bibliography of Philip Roth Criticism and Resources—2015 Compiled by Mike Witcombe What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2015, including critical works (books, book chapters, journal essays, and special journal issues). All entries will reflect the format as defined in the third edition of the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (2008). All sources are arranged in alphabetical order according to the author’s last name. Individual essays included in edited collections are grouped in “Book Chapters” and are cross-listed according to MLA style. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook readers, are not included in this listing. Given the recent growth in e-book technology, digital versions of Roth’s texts are becoming standard practice. This being the case, none of these e-book versions are included in this bibliography. Readers and researchers can easily visit online booksellers to find digital editions. BOOKS The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Basu, Ann. States of Trial—Manhood in Philip Roth’s America. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print. Kaplan, Brett Ashley. Jewish Anxiety and the Novels of Philip Roth. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Print. EDITED COLLECTIONS AND SPECIAL ISSUES Koy, Christopher E., Ed. “The Worldliness of Philip Roth.” Special issue of Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature and Culture 25:49 (2015). Print. BOOK CHAPTERS Aarons, Vicki. “The Making of American Jewish Identities in Postwar American Fiction.” The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Brauner and Stähler 43-53. Print. [End Page 111] Batnitzky, Leora. “Beyond Theodicy? Joban Themes in Philip Roth’s Nemesis.” The Book of Job: Aesthetics, Ethics, Hermeneutics. Eds. Leora Batnitzky and Ilona Pardes. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. 2015. 213-24. Print. Budick, Emily Miller. “Ghostwriting the Holocaust: The Ghost Writer, The Diary, The Kindly Ones, and Me.” The Subject of Holocaust Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2015. 19-36. Print. Furst, Lilian R. “Ritualized Bellyaching: Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint.” Just Talk: Narratives of Psychotherapy. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2015. 57-70. Print. Löffler, Philipp. “‘A Singular Act of Invention’: Storytelling, Pluralism, and Philip Roth’s American Trilogy.” Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015. 97-126. Print. Mosher, Paul W. and Jeffrey Berman. “Angry Acts and Counteracts in Philip Roth’s Life and Art.” Confidentiality and its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 82-104. Print. _______. “The Angry Act: The Psychoanalyst’s Breach of Confidentiality in Philip Roth’s Life and Art.” Confidentiality and its Discontents: Dilemmas of Privacy in Psychotherapy. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. 63-81. Print. Osmanović, Sabina. “Dealing with Evanescence: The Motif of Old Age and the Crisis of Meaning in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal.” Mapping the World of Anglo-American Studies at the Turn of the Century. Eds. Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević and Marija Krivokapić. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2015. 175-81. Print. Pozorski, Aimee. “American Jewish Life Writing, Illness and the Ethics of Innovation.” The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Eds. Brauner and Stähler 43-53. Print. Scanlan, Margaret. “Strange Times to Be a Jew: Alternative History After 9/11.” Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism. Eds. John Duvall and Robert Marzec. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 168-93. Print. Schreier, Benjamin. “Why Jews Aren’t Normal: The Unrepresentable Future of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.” The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History. New York: New York UP, 2015. 149-84. Print. Segal, Lynne. “The Circus of (male) Ageing: Philip Roth and the Perils of Masculinity.” Psychosocial Imaginaries: Perspectives on Temporality, Subjectivities and Activism. Ed. Stephen Frosh. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 87-104. Print. Tandon, Bharat. “Philip Roth’s Kinds of Writing.” Writing for the New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical. Ed. Fiona Green. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2015. Web. JOURNAL ARTICLES AND ESSAYS Anténe, Petr. “Racial Conflicts in the Campus Novel of the Early 2000s: Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and...

Spatialising Early and Late Modernity: Representations of London in Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Dr. Dee and Hawksmoor

Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) and The House of Dr. Dee (1993) are examples of a distinctive British form of contemporary experimental historical fiction, and through representations of London they explore the popular dimension of early modernity, showing how the capital’s spaces both embodied and produced multiple modernity, as well as the unsung pre-modern allegiances that critiqued modern forms. While the novels’ respective Renaissance and post-Restoration settings allow them to explore different stages in the development of both London modernity and resistant forms, their juxtaposition of early and late modern narratives establishes a compelling parallel between early modern and late twentieth-century London. Both sets of narratives also stage a shift away from modern forms towards inherited pre-modern allegiances, connecting this to a new relationship with the capital’s inheritance of pre-Reformation and Gothic built space, as well as an equivalent tradition of London writing, one in which Ackroyd’s novels themselves participate.

Landscapes of History in the Novels of Lawrence Norfolk

Abstract This article deals with novels by Lawrence Norfolk which are read with a focus on their visual quality and the way they depict history. It is argued that Norfolk’s historical novels are unique in their portrayal of “landscapes of history”, large canvases in which individual characters play marginal, or a rather insignificant role. This approach distinguishes Norfolk from much of contemporary historical fiction, albeit at times this strategy might not be wholly satisfactory from a critical perspective. However, the article claims that Norfolk’s novels are intellectually inspiring since, similar to landscape, they invite a certain gaze, yet deny us the possibility of naming, of conceptualising. They provide readers with impressive vistas on history, which is seen as something too large to understand and penetrate. In this the novels are anti-humanistic. Individual characters (and their actions) are insignificant, or significant only to such an extent that they subscribe to some mythical framework, as Norfolk shows in, arguably, his best novel, In the Shape of a Boar (2000).

Katherine Cooper and Emma Short (eds) The female figure in contemporary historical fiction

Katherine Cooper and Emma Short (eds) <i>The female figure in contemporary historical fiction</i>

Supplementing the Supplement: Looking at the Function of Afterwords and Acknowledgements in some Canadian Historical Novels

But the supplement supplements. adds only to replace. Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology IN perhaps the most well-known chapter in Of Grammatology,... That Dangerous Supplement ... Jacques Derrida examines the concept of the supplement. Here, he uses Jean Jacques Rousseau's work to show how writing complements/stands in for the speech act and tries to recapture the presence of the speech and the speaker: It is the addition of a technique, a sort of artificial and artful ruse to make speech present when it is actually absent (144). Rousseau, Derrida goes on to argue, perceives writing as a dangerous means for capturing presence, but a necessary one: Writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself. And there is a fatal necessity, inscribed in the very functioning of the sign, that the substitute makes one forget the vicariousness of its own function and makes itself pass for the plenitude of a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplements. (144) The supplement is dangerous because it fools the reader into perceiving a completeness when, in fact, the supplement only ever points to a lack not only in the absence it is ostensibly rectifying but in itself as well. Derrida's notion of supplement, then, is one that plays with the space between presence and absence. Its very presence highlights its own absence; what is there highlights what is missing. Supplementarity is perhaps a particularly useful lens through which to consider the end notes so often included in historical fiction. These afterwords or acknowledgements, as they are typically titled, potentially occupy the infinite regression of the supplement in that they are themselves supplements to novels which are themselves supplements to previous narratives about capital-H history. Moreover, these paratextual devices simultaneously point to the presence of historical authority and archive as well as its absence in both the novel they proceed and in themselves as ostensible complement to that novel. At the heart of these afterword/ acknowledgements there is an anxiety about the ways in which not just history and not just historical fiction but the paratextual apparatus itself falls short. Using Derrida's discussion of supplementarity as a means of illuminating how the material of the afterword/acknowledgements functions within historical fiction, this paper will examine the ways in which these paratextual devices expand on, conflict with, and further complicate the issues of absence and presence with which a novelistic narrative of history engages. Through a close analysis of the afterword/acknowledgements sections of five contemporary Canadian novels--John Steffler's The Afterlife of George Cartwright, Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic, Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road--I will explore how each engages with the problems of representation (problems also explored within the novels themselves) to varying degrees and in different ways. However, before unpacking the novels, let me first draw a more in depth connection between history, afterwords, and supplementarity. Although Derrida discusses the supplement within the context of language, it is a concept that is also applicable to representations of history. That is, when a historian presents a new account of the past, it is a supplement to those accounts that already exist--it both adds to and completes the existing records. However, there is a further complication with the supplement, for in its paradoxical function there also exists a latent sense of continuity. We expect, in other words, that the supplement will be added to or further completed by other supplements. The supplement, therefore, is never enough. The supplement will always already require another supplement. This problem with the historical supplement is particularly apparent within contemporary historical fiction, a genre that exists to supplement history, while bearing within it an awareness of its own supplementarity. …

The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction

The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction

Reconsidering Anti-Semitism and White Slavery in Contemporary Historical Fiction About Argentina

In Argentina, a multimedia boom in historical fictions about the so-called Jewish White Slave Trade of the early twentieth century in Buenos Aires has created a consensus about a particular set of events that deviates in consistent ways from the available evidence. In this essay I show how the literary consensus about the history of white slavery emerges as a consistent set of narrative tropes; then I discuss how in several contemporary historical novels the admixture of history and fiction seems to allow anti-Semitism to be both omnipresent and depoliticized — simultaneously minimized in Argentine political history and dramatized as the hobby of eccentric fictional sociopaths. Furthermore, Jews are split into “good” and “bad” elements, with the unmanageable part cast out through collaboration between “good” Jews and gentiles so as to consolidate a Jewish-Argentine identity. I then consider how the portrayal of anti-Semitism in the novels resonates with cultural debates about historical anti-Semitism — particularly the contested anti-Semitism of the right-wing dictatorship that governed Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Specifically, I suggest that the “splitting” of Jews that occurs in these novels, together with the view that anti-Semitism only exists “outside” the state, make possible the mutual legitimization of a continuous Jewish-Argentine subject and a continuous Argentine state. Finally, I show how contemporary literature, by breaking radically with both the cultural consensus about white slavery and its univocal narrative of anti-Semitism, can actually help to theorize a different affective relationship to history.

Horatio the Hero: The Depiction of Horatio Nelson in Contemporary Historical Fiction

Horatio the Hero: The Depiction of Horatio Nelson in Contemporary Historical Fiction

Postmodernism and the past : A romance

British contemporary historical fiction is the genre that most closely, extensively and fruitfully explores the questions concerning the nature and scope of representation raised by postmodern historical and narrative theory. One interesting trait, common to the most speculative works of historical fiction published in the last fifteen years, is the adoption of Romance in all its modes — as a motif of the plot (the love story) and as a narrative mode (defining itself against the novel). Indeed Romance is the means by which the contemporary historical novel first dramatises and then investigates the representation of the past in the context of postmodernism. Lindsay Clarkes The Chymical Wedding (1989) and A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), both subtitled A Romance, epitomise the tendency described above. Their discussion in this paper will reveal not only the strategies by which these works deal with the intersection of postmodernism and representation, but also the Romantic elements inherent in postmodernism itself.

Richard Nixon by Robert Coover, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

ED IT O R ’S CH O ICE* R I C H A R D N I X O N B Y R O B E R T C O O V E R , R O L A N D B A R T H E S B Y R O L A N D B A R T H E S STAN FOGEL University of Waterloo “ Imagination rules the world, shithead.” Robert coover “The Natural is never an attribute of physical Nature; it is the alibi paraded by a social majority; the natural is a legality.” roland barthes Xhab Hassan’s injunction in Paracriticisms to withstand the subjugation or assimilation of the new is apposite here: Reaction to the new has its own reasons that reason seldom acknowledges. It also has its rhetoric of dismissal, a. The Fad — “ It’s a passing fashion, frivolous; if we ignore it now, it will quietly go away” . . . b. The Old Story — “ It’s been done before, there’s nothing new in it; you can find it in Euripides, Sterne or Whitman” .. . c. The Safe Version — “Yes, it seems new, but in the same genre, I prefer Duchamp; he really did it better” . . . d. The Newspeak of Art — “ The avant-garde is just the new academicism.” 1 Some stories by Max Apple and Donald Barthelme and novels such as Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March by Frederic Tuten, and The Public Burning by Robert Coover arguably con­ stitute a distinctive genre: historical fiction differentiated from a more tra­ ditional historical fiction by its parodic and metafictive characteristics; meta­ fiction defines that self-conscious fiction which is primarily concerned with exploring the theory of fiction. Whereas traditional historical fiction incor­ porates historical details to provide verisimilitude or the texture of a partic­ ular period and/or locale, the new historical fiction seeks to deconstruct the historical context, to reveal it as a construct, as artifice. Of Doctorow’s * The category of “ Editor’s Choice” has been established by the Advisory Editorial Board for those essays which, for reasons of subject, methodology, conclusions, or the like, fail to gain the unqualified acceptance of the usual panel of readers for the Journal but which the Editor feels should nevertheless — perhaps because of their very unorthodoxy or controversiality — be offered to the readers of English Studies in Canada for their consideration. E n g l is h St u d ies in C anada, v iii, 2, June 1982 purpose in Ragtime, Barbara Foley writes, “he is using the reader’s encyclo­ pedic knowledge that a historical Freud, Jung, Goldman, and Nesbit did in fact exist in order to pose an open challenge to the reader’s preconceived notions about what historical ‘truth’ actually is.” 2 This is in contradistinction to Lukács’s position in The Historical Novel: “ Detail. . . is only a means for achieving . . . historical faithfulness” 3 and characters “in their psychology and destiny always represent social trends and historical forces.” 4 Although J. Ffollowell’s Fact and Fiction and M. Zavarzadeh’s The Mythopoeic Reality attest to critical interest in contemporary historical fiction, their focus has been primarily on writers such as Truman Capote and Nor­ man Mailer whose perspectives differ from those of Coover, Barthelme, et al. The work of Capote and Mailer is less of a challenge to constituted reality than it is an acceptance of or a repugnance toward the absurdity of that reality. Zavarzadeh, to be sure, hints of a yoking of both approaches when he writes, “The nonfiction novelist’s arrangement of facts is not endorsive (authenticating) but mythopoeic: it reveals the disorienting fictiveness inherent in facts.” 5 Nevertheless, Zavarzadeh’s emphasis devolves mainly on the “ fictiveness inherent in facts” rather than on the myths which give rise to those facts, on the bizarre quality of reality in the contemporary world rather than on the ideology or doxa which might account for the bizarreness. Events are transcribed by Capote, Mailer, and others such as Flunter Thomp­ son and Andy Warhol because the events themselves are fantastical and novelistic. Zavarzadeh cites, for instance, what he called the empirical irony in a remark made...