Historical Fiction Research Articles

Remembering and forgetting in Sara Collins’ The confessions of Frannie Langton

Set in Jamaica and London in the 1820s, Sara Collins’ debut novel The confessions of Frannie Langton (2019) is a neo-slave historical novel par excellence. In it, Collins shapes and reshapes several subgenres of historical fiction, such as gothic fiction, historical romance, and historical mystery. Facing a trial based on the accusation of killing her master and mistress, Frannie Langton narrates her life story in the form of confessions to her lawyer as she endeavors to remember what happened on the night of the murder. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: Is Frannie trying to remember or to forget what happened? Why does Collins add strong gothic shades to her historical novel? How does she manipulate the historical whodunits of the crime in relation to Frannie’s memory? Why does Collins choose a lesbian relationship to feature the historical romance in the novel? The paper examines how a post-2000 historical novel manipulates its conventional subgenres by adhering to some and changing others, starting with the gothic, then the murder story and, lastly, the lesbian romance in telling a neo-slave story.

O potrzebie optymizmu w fantastyce naukowej

This article examines the role of optimism, a philosophical-psychological category, in science fiction literature discourse. Pessimism, the counterpoint to optimism, clearly dominates the contemporary form of this genre. Conversely, optimism in science fiction increasingly demands a deliberate stance from writers and readers, challenging the predominance of pessimism. The author identifies genre characteristics that lend themselves to optimistic perspectives and offers an overview of periods in science fiction history where optimism prevailed. Additionally, the article highlights projects where science fiction intersects with social activism.

Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy

This is a book review of the book, Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy by Frank Serafini. It is a 189-page book published in 2014 by Teachers College Press. It discusses the evolving concept of literacy in the age of multimodality. Organized into three parts and framed by a prologue and an epilogue, the book begins with an introduction that sets the stage for understanding the multimodal world and its relevance to educators. The first part lays a theoretical foundation for multimodality, guiding educators in their instructional approaches. The second part presents a practical framework for engaging with multimodal texts, highlighting the significance of picture books in literacy education and exploring how students can interact with various multimodal formats both as consumers and producers. The final part examines ten distinct types of multimodal ensembles, including diverse formats like picture books (postmodern, wordless, historical fiction, informational), illustrated novels, graphic novels, cartoons, comics, advertisements, news reports, films, and digital media. In the closure, a helpful glossary provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of multimodal configurations and visual meaning-making systems.

100 years of James Joyce’s women: wife, daughter and friend

ABSTRACT One hundred years after the publication of Ulysses (1922), the novel that would immortalize James Joyce, his ouvre continues to attract readers, intellectuals and artists as much as his private life still fascinates Joyceans, writers and a general public. The present contribution analyses three recent additions to the so-called ‘Joyce industry’, studying a series of fictional texts that feature the allegedly inexhaustible topic of the Irish writer’s complex relationship with women. Annabel Abbs’s The Joyce Girl (2016), Nuala O’Connor’s Nora (2021) and Kerri Maher’s The Paris Bookseller (2022) are the focus of the present contribution, three biofictions of, respectively, Joyce’s daughter, his wife Nora and of Sylvia Beach, the woman who published Ulysses in book form. It is our intention to assess the extent to which these narratives offer a retrieval of three women’s stories, to study them in the context of recent vindications of biofiction as a subgenre that must be distinguished from both biography and historical fiction and, above all, to account for the undeniable interest and even popularity of women related to Joyce among Joycean scholars but also among average readers.

Data Bodies

Abstract This essay examines two recent books that each take up the vexed topic bodies of data in relation to literature and race in the US: Richard Jean So’s Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction and Elizabeth Rodrigues’s Collecting Lives: Critical Data Narrative as Modernist Aesthetic in Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Literatures. Each book, in its own way, asks literary scholars to take the data corpus seriously as both an object and a method of study. While acknowledging that the collection of bodies of data has long been used to efface, dehumanize, and racialize, So and Rodrigues ask readers not to dismiss reactively the data corpus’s potential to also be an unexpected tool for refuting those same naturalized and totalizing narratives. Contemplating, as they do, the unique temporality and spatiality of the accretion of singular points into a collective data, the books explore what a data corpus looks, feels, and sounds like and what it might tell us about the relationship between bodies, books in twentieth-century US literature, and the stories that have and could be told about both.Thinking in different ways about the vexed relationship between bodies of data, literature, and race in the US, Rodrigues and So each demonstrate that, while data cannot speak for itself, there are some stories we can neither hear, see, nor tell without its help.

Humanizing History: Using Historical Fiction Texts to Develop Disciplinary and Racial Literacies

AbstractHistorical fiction is a powerful genre for inviting children into meaningful conversations centered on the lived experiences of others. Historical inquiry immerses readers in interdisciplinary research experiences and complements language arts Common Core State Standards that call for a balance of fiction and non‐fiction text. Antiracist lenses enhance inquiry conversations and help students articulate nuanced understandings of the fictionalized historical events while developing disciplinary and racial literacy knowledge necessary for humanizing history. This article highlights how we, as teacher educators, use historical fiction to engage teacher candidates in inquiry‐based social studies lessons to develop their disciplinary and racial literacy skills and practices. Then, we offer an example of how to integrate the C3 inquiry approach using Finding Langston (Cline‐Ransome, 2018), a historical fiction text set during the Great Migration, to engage elementary‐aged readers in explorations of history, sparking children’s agency and engagement in their own learning.

The Lost World of Rani Jindan: Rewriting Women’s History in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s the Last Queen

The paper aims to look at the politics of representation and the importance of historical fiction in renegotiating women’s position in history by focusing on the representation of Rani Jindan Kaur in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Last Queen (2021). The book is written from Rani Jindan Kaur’s perspective who was the last wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the last regent queen of the Sikh Empire to reclaim her lost identity. This analysis begins with a brief description of Sikh empire and its glorious past with a special focus on a woman who equally contributed and shaped it. It then traces how historians have always been partial towards women for not giving them enough space in the annals of history. This underrepresentation was the systematic erasure as not only were they punished for stepping outside the limited roles offered to them but if they achieve great things they were often ignored or forced to submit to the prevailing gender norms of their times. It then focuses on how Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has used the erasure of women representation in history as a winning chance to rewrite the lost world of Rani Jindan that is not much talked about in historical documents. It further points out how this systemic bias has perpetuated a skewed historical narrative that failed to recognize the full extent of women's contributions and resilience throughout history.

Georgette Heyer, history, and historical fiction

The review discusses a volume of scholarly articles edited by Samantha Rayner and Kim Wilkins that sets out to present a comprehensive body of research into the oeuvre of the English novelist Georgette Heyer. The book comprises several sections: gender, genre, sources, and circulation and reception. Heyer is the renowned founder of Regency romance, whose work is noted for exceptional attention to historical facts and reconstruction of the aristocratic slang of the period. Her novels, however, remained largely ignored by scholars. The volume’s editors succeed in producing an invaluable compilation enriching the studies of 1920s English genre literature by considering Heyer’s work in the context of post-war culture, with its heightened interest in the Napoleonic era, as well as in relation to literary tradition, especially Jane Austen’s works, but also referencing adventure novels of Heyer’s older contemporaries Baroness Orczy and Rafael Sabatini.

Haunted Transpositions in Violet Kupersmith’s Build Your House Around My Body (2021)

Twisting and uncanny, Build Your House Around My Body is a kaleidoscopic hallucination of a novel. Its story fits uneasily in multiple genres, from the Gothic to the bildungsroman, and it is told via the seemingly contradictory—yet ultimately sympathetic—techniques of magical realism and historical fiction. The primary protagonist of the book is Winnie, an American-Vietnamese woman whose biracial identity has alienated her from her dual cultures but also, crucially, from her self. Through her narrative we learn not only the histories of the characters around her, but also the recent history of Vietnam. The novel charts a sinuous and haunting movement across time, space and identity, creating a complex yet fascinating book of shifting narratives and meanings.

Specific features of proverbs in language teaching

The urgency of the topic proverbs teaching in language education is due to the possibility of studying proverbs as linguistic units that enlarge the students outlook and worldview. Proverbs do reflect reality and do express the activities of the inhabitants of a certain language, which has some fragments of the world, although they reproduce from generation to generation the activities and cultural and national traditions of the people, its indigenous inhabitants. The scientific value of this is determined by the need to organize proverbial words and is determined by the fact that it allows you to make statements about certain aspects of what you are actively studying! There are currently problems in the relationship between language and culture that naturally reinforce the ideas found in proverbs and their relevance in philosophy. The notorious material allows one to penetrate into the area of mental activity of a linguistically determined society and opens up wide opportunities for conducting comparative research. A study of the system of proverbs and its educational role in language teaching, allowing to observe universal and national cultures in mentalities and contribute to the theoretical problems and general practices of applied linguistics in general, to solve methodological issues for carrying out linguocultural and methodological analysis. There are many ways to inculcate national education in future generations. One way is to shape the national consciousness by teaching proverbs and sayings that have been preserved from one generation to the next and have preserved the culture, identity, and traditions of the nation. This research studies the linguistic and cultural features of English proverbs. Therefore, in order to strengthen international relations, to introduce traditional proverbs, it is necessary to qualitatively determine their linguistic and cultural features. It is important to read texts with cultural coloring, phraseological phrases, catchphrases, real words, proverbs, legends and stories that reveal the identity of the people, as well as works which have a significant place in the history of fiction in shaping a person’s national consciousness. The people's life and world view are preserved in proverbs, metaphors and symbols. They are the sources of the most valuable information about the culture and mentality of the people.

African historical fiction and the Novel of Ideas

This paper tries to interrogates the way in which the demands for the African novel of ideas can be fulfilled on an African historical fiction. It uses thesis of Professor Jean-Marie Jackson’s seminal book, The African Novel of Ideas as its substructure. Toward the end it gives a brief global summary of the origins of historical fiction and discusses the status quo of the Southern African historical fiction.

War in the Works of the National Literary Award “Big Book”: Historical Facts and Fiction

The article deals with the main aspects, ways of understanding and features of the artistic representation of war as a socio-historical phenomenon in contemporary Russian literature. As an example some books received the National Literary Award “Big Book” were chosen. Each work is analyzed as one of the options existing in Russian literature for revealing the war theme. The combination of these options clearly shows the variety of possible approaches of the writers to this topic.

A Narrative Stylistic Analysis to Amitav Ghosh’s Fictional Narratives

Narrative Stylistics is the most recently established idea and area in contemporary stylistics. William Labov (1972), Fowler (1977, 1996) and Bakhtin (1986) were major contributions to contemporary stylistics and narratology. Without a doubt, the story has gained a bigger place in the minds of stylists, analysts, and critics. The social, historical, and cultural foundations of story stylistics are the most important, where narrative and discourse stylistics collide. It gave the best scope to study Amitav Ghosh's historical fiction in Sea of Poppies and River of Smoke with narrative and cognitive stylistics. This paper focused on the study of narrative stylistics and deictic shift theory, and how they were employed in these two novels that resulted in the cognitive effect on readers' minds.

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE LEXEMES HEART AND SOUL IN THE NOVEL «THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD» BY COLSON WHITEHEAD

Background. The article deals with the analysis of the conceptualization of the lexemes heart and soul in the English language based on a historical fiction novel «The Underground Railroad» written by American author Colson Whitehead. Even though there is a number of research dedicated to investigation of the nature of concept and conceptualization this topic is still of paramount importance. 
 The purpose. The purpose of the investigation is to study the peculiarities of conceptualization of the lexemes heart and soul and count their conceptual meanings based on the novel «The Underground Railroad» written by Colson Whitehead. 
 Methods. To reach the aim of the research the following methods have been chosen: the descriptive method, the comparative analysis, the constructive method, the cognitive analysis.
 Results. Due to the results of the investigation, the lexeme heart which has been used 26 times in the novel as a separate lexical unit, as a component of a phrase, as a derivative and as a compound noun represents 10 conceptual meanings: 1) center; 2) complete involvement; 3) feeling of fear; 4) sincerity; 5) enthusiasm and energy; 6) unconcern; 7) kindness; 8) indifference; 9) body organ; 10) hopefulness. According to the conducted analysis, the lexeme soul used 21 times in the text of the novel conveys two main conceptual meanings: 1) a person; 2. nonphysical part of a person. 
 Discussion. Having researched all 26 examples of use of the lexeme heart and 21 instances of use of the lexeme soul in the novel «The Underground Railroad» written by Colson Whitehead, the following conclusion is formed: the number of the lexeme heart and the lexeme soul used in the novel is not significantly different, the lexeme heart is used 26 times and the lexeme soul is implemented 21 times but the number of conceptual meanings verbalized by the lexemes heart and soul is dramatically different as the lexeme heart expresses 10 conceptual ideas, whereas the lexeme soul counts 2 main conceptual meanings. This result can be explained by the use of the lexeme heart as a stem of compound nouns und as a root of derivatives which also influences the number of conceptual meanings the lexeme heart reveals, and the results can be also explained by the specificity of the genre of the novel.

Trapped Between Hitler and Stalin: Nazi Bogeymen and Implicated Subjects in Canadian Children’s Historical Fiction

Trapped Between Hitler and Stalin: Nazi Bogeymen and Implicated Subjects in Canadian Children’s Historical Fiction

Next-Generation Memory and Ukrainian Canadian Children’s Historical Fiction. The Seeds of Memory by Mateusz Świetlicki (review)

Next-Generation Memory and Ukrainian Canadian Children’s Historical Fiction. The Seeds of Memory by Mateusz Świetlicki (review)

Historiographic Metafiction: A Study of Susan Abulhawa’s The Blue Between Sky and Water

This article aims to show the application of historiographic metafiction in Susan Abulhawa’s The Blue Between Sky and Water (2016), highlighting the embodiment of historiographic metafictional characteristics in rewriting Palestinian history, exactly the Nakba (1948). Since Linda Hutcheon calls for revision of the past in order to rewrite history, Abulhawa’s work has granted her a place among postmodern literary authors since she does so. Such an aesthetic and resisting act aims at acknowledging falsity and prejudice practiced by both ends responsible of historical documentation: the winner and the looser. This study argues that metafictional techniques allow the author to re-visit the Nakba (1948), re-present the events and eventually allow readers to re-pen history. Simultaneously, the novel’s historiographic metafictional characteristics will be underscored including challenging one historical truth, blending history and fiction, using self-reflexive narration, narrating through an openly controlling narrator, and importing real and famous historical and political personalities. The findings show that historiographic metafiction is applicable in Abulhawa’s novel. Interestingly, this paper demonstrates how the author enlarges her scope of writing, by adding postmodern dimension to the political and historical issues she depicts.

ПІСЛЯ ВАЛЬТЕРА СКОТТА: АНГЛІЙСЬКИЙ ІСТОРИЧНИЙ РОМАН 1830–1840-Х РОКІВ

Background. The study examines the unique evolution of the historical novel genre following its rise to prominence in the first half of the 19th century, driven by Walter Scott's "Waverley Novels". The further development of the genre in early Victorian and mid-19th century English literature is traced, particularly in the works of G. P. R. James, W. H. Ainsworth, E. Bulwer-Lytton, and C. Kingsley. The relevance of the study is determined by the need to reinterpret issues of history, and the interaction between history and literature in the context of contemporary literary discourse. The goal of the research is to identify the artistic dominants and main directions of the development of the historical novel throughout the 19th century. Methods. The research employs a combined approach that integrates elements of historical-cultural, comparative-historical, and reception-aesthetic methods, as well as genre and postmodernist criticism. The research strategy is also based on methods of semantic, stylistic, narratological, contextual, intertextual, and textual analysis with elements of comparative typology. Results. It has been established that the formation of the historical novel genre and its rapidly growing popularity indicate a shift in aesthetic dominants in 19th-century literature. The popularity of Walter Scott's novels coincides with an intensified interest in national history during the Victorian period. The historical works of Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Babington Macaulay significantly contribute to the rising authority and popularity of historical fiction, influencing writers. Victorian historical novelists advocate for adherence to factual accuracy. At the same time, there emerges a tendency within the genre towards formulaic romanticization and mythologization of historical portrayals to cater to popular tastes. Сonclusions. The rising popularity of Victorian historical novels was not accompanied by an improvement in their artistic qualities. As the genre became more popular, it gradually lost the best features of the Walter Scott model. Mid-19th century English historical novels interpret history in connection with contemporary issues, often marked by bias, didacticism, and ideological engagement. The depiction of history allowed Victorian writers to illustrate progressive changes and celebrate the triumph of contemporary progress over the "old times," thereby reflecting the Enlightenment view of history that was also characteristic of Victorian progressivism.

After Hegel: A postmodern genealogy of historical fiction

In this article, we analyze a possible form of the relationship between modernity and postmodernity by examining the transformation of the place of enunciation of criticism as a philosophical narrative and using it as a historical and philosophical criterion. To achieve this, we first focus on key moments in the critical discourse of modernity, and then analyze the role of Kantian criticism in the formation of a postmodern imaginary associated with the notions of useful fiction and linguistification. Finally, from a Hegelian perspective, we consider the validity of the idea of universal history and its connections to emancipatory narratives.

A Critical Study of Text Interpretation in the Novel, "A Case of Exploding Mangoes in the Light of Historicism"

The study of Hanif's historic novel "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" (2008), involves interpreting history in the light of new realities and reflecting on the cultural context. Hanif effectively portrays the authentic historical context of Pakistani society, allowing for a more insightful and creative interpretation of history. This study examines the historical fiction "A Case of Exploding Mangoes" (2008) by Hanif, employing the New Historicism theory. The objective of the study is to analyze and evaluate literary texts in a critical manner, allowing students to have a comprehensive understanding of the text. The study is a qualitative analysis that applies Greenblatt's theory of "New Historicism" (1980) to examine a text within its socio-cultural and historical framework, including the cultural setting. The study found that understanding a work within the context of socio-cultural factors leads to the creation of more imaginative literary interpretations as a whole.