Historical Fiction Research Articles

DeLillo’s Libra and the Subjunctive Mood as Fictionalization

Don DeLillo’s Libra is often considered a postmodernist rendition of history, but there exist temporal distortions in his fiction that must be parsed into the subjunctive mood instead of the simple past tense. The fictive transformation from the temporal tense to the mood of potentiality underlies DeLillo’s fictionalization of history that attempts to problematize the ironclad facts. This would to power manifests the point that fiction is a poetic and emotive alternative to actualized reality. What is Real to fiction lies in its virtual reality.

Three Generations of Belarusian Historical Fiction in Prose and Verse: Inspiration and Iconoclasm

Beginning with attempts to deny or repress the very idea of Belarusian history, this article is devoted the use of historical themes by three generations of Belarusian writers, with the youngest first and ending with three from the middle generation who, as a rule, do not show the influence of their elders on themselves, nor do they seem greatly to influence the younger writers. All ages, however, are engaged in the same struggle to counter the anti-historical ideas propagated by the leadership of their country, and the younger writers bring a sometimes unusual, indeed iconoclastic, approach to this important task.

SEEKING SPACE FOR LOVE, SELF-DISCOVERY, AND INDEPENDENCE IN LOVING FRANK, BY NANCY HORAN

Fostering to present an analysis of the impacts of Mamah Borthwick’s relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural works, narrated through the historical fiction Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan (2007), this paper aims to discuss the concepts of architectural ekphrasis in order to delve into how the interaction with architecture can bring up Mamah Borthwick’s – the main character – social context and close relationship with the Woman Movement. For that, the space within three houses has been analyzed and through ekphrases we discuss how the main character develops love, self-discovery, and search for independence. In order to that, this article is anchored by the notions proposed by Claus Clüver (2019), Gaston Bachelard (1994), and Miriam Vieira (2017; 2021a; 2021b).

Historical figures in “Fate/Grand Order”: adapting Anastasia Romanova

Historical events and figures tend to escape people’s memory as time goes by. In some cases, they are replaced by popular culture adaptations, e.g., video games, fiction, films, etc. Such adaptations may be beneficial to historical memory, preserving their historical models for posterity. Sometimes, adaptation become part of fictional history. “Fate/Grand Order” is a game released by Type-Moon in 2015 (Japan). Its fictional universe makes an active use of various characters of folklore and history, e.g., Joan of Arc, King Arthur, etc. The aim of the study is to examine the adaptation of Anastasia Romanova in the game “Fate/Grand Order”. The adaptation analysis scheme proposed by Linda Hutcheon, as well as the comparative method to cross-reference dialogs, illustrations, skills, craft essence in the game with photographs and biography of the real Anastasia Romanova were used. It is proved that Anastasia the Duchess of the Permafrost Empire from “Fate/Grand Order” is indeed an adaptation of the real Anastasia Romanova, the fourth daughter of the last Russian Emperor Nicolas II, although somewhat modified to match the traditional imagery of the Japanese popular culture.

The Body that Writes: Gender, Class and the Abject Female Body in Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites (2013)

Hannah Kent’s debut novel Burial Rites (2013) is a historical true-crime novel that recovers the story of a female perpetrator, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, sentenced to death for her part in a gruesome double murder in nineteenth-century Iceland. This article reads Kent’s novel, which draws on painstaking research, as a work of feminist revisionism that is part of a genealogy of historical fiction by and about women that seeks to adopt and indeed adapt the true-crime genre for the recovery of historical women’s voices from the margins, the best-known example of which remains Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996). However, while Kent’s work shares many features with Atwood’s work, I contend that what sets Burial Rites apart from its predecessors is the way Kent skillfully handles Agnes’s ambiguous body as text. The article consequently models a reading of Kent’s true-crime feminist historical fiction via Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance to reveal how the novel unpicks the workings of gender, class and sexuality in nineteenth-century Iceland in a bid to retrieve Agnes from historical archival obscurity and restore her as part of feminist historiography. 

Muzieknoten en voetnoten

This article delves into the cross media project Veurvaajers (Ancestors, 2022), which weaves together family history, pop music, and contemporary photography, while at the same time linking microhistories in the Meuse-Rhine Region (1780-1980) to general historical developments in society. The article explores how dialogues between scholarly research and different forms of art can help us make sense of the past by raising new questions and reaching new audiences. The article dissects the conception and execution of Veurvaajers, shedding light on the project’s blueprint and implementation. Along the way, it highlights both opportunities and limitations of historical fiction as a literary genre, and explores how historical actors, objects, and trends can be ‘auditised’ in a convincing manner. Much attention is directed towards the Industrial Revolution in the city of Maastricht from the 1830s onwards, underscoring its pivotal role in the larger historical context.

Creating Cromwell: an analysis of the historical novel’s position and potentiality through a study of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy

ABSTRACT This article considers the role historical novels can play in representing the past, and to what extent (and how) such fiction can both challenge and enhance historiography. Focusing on Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, it looks at how a novelist can use literary techniques, imaginative reconstruction of gaps in the historical record, and alternative interpretation of existing historiography (including primary sources) to radically alter our perception of the past; and indeed whether as a genre it may be able to do so more effectively than traditional (academic) historiography. In doing so, it traces the development of critical theory on the historical novel from Georg Lukács through postmodern critics such as Hayden White and Linda Hutcheon, to the recent work of Rosario Arias and Elodie Rousselot. Acknowledging the subjectivity and unreliability of ‘history’ (often presented as fact or ‘the past’) it argues for a blurring of the line between historiography and historical fiction, concluding that at least some historical novels should be granted admission to the field of historiography. The first steps towards this have been taken in the gradual acceptance of narrative history as subjective and just as incapable of ever truly representing the past as any other form of writing. It is to be hoped that there might be a similar acceptance of the historical novel’s ability to represent the past (albeit differently), to imaginatively reconstruct pasts that might have been. Rather than an inferior form, sharply delineated from ‘history’, might historical novels form a rich addition to a historiography considered as a spectrum rather than an exclusive and excluding discipline?

Five Language Style In The Sea Speaks His Name Novel Leila S. Chudori

Language style is a formal form of language that is used to communicate with others. The purpose of this research is to examine the language employed style used in the novel The Sea Speaks His Name. This Novel is a historical fiction authored by Leila S. Chudori and released in Jakarta in 2017. The data is taken from the novel The Sea Speaks His Name conversation text. A qualitative descriptive research design was used in this study. This analysis is based on Martin Joos' (1976) concept of five language style : frozen styles, formal styles, consultative styles, casual styles, and intimate styles. The results indicate there are thirty (30) data points from the film's conversations to conduct figurative language. The data analyzed shows that the novel has twenty-four cases of frozen (none), formal (one), consultative (seven cases), casual (eleven cases), and intimate (five cases) styles.. This means that the most common casual style is obviously used in family and close friend communication. Based on the findings of the study, students in the English Department should conduct additional analysis of the five language types employed in other materials such as films, books, or articles.

Pregnant Bodies in Transit: Maternity, Migration, and the 1962 Sino-Indian War in Rita Chowdhury’s Chinatown Days

Signed as a response to the Sino-Indian war in 1962, the Defence of India Act facilitated the mass incarceration of Indians having Chinese ethnicity, not even sparing children and pregnant women. Rita Chowdhury’s historical fiction Chinatown Days (2018), translated from the Assamese novel Makam (2010), rescues this systematic elimination of the Assamese-Chinese narrative that is otherwise absent in the dominant paradigms of this war history. Chowdhury conducts a rare historiography tracing the origin of the community in colonial India, their internment at the Deoli camp following the war of 1962, and ultimately their deportation to China. Chowdhury’s novel illustrates that the worst victims of this forced migration were the women who had to bear the burden of their reproductive bodies. By borrowing specific contexts from Chowdhury’s fiction that illuminates the challenges faced by pregnant Assamese-Chinese women, this paper conducts a gendered investigation into the events of this state-sanctioned forced displacement and deportation. It interrogates the idea of constructive nation-building through state-sanctioned banishment of the unborn racially undesirable Assamese-Chinese children. It examines how the displaced pregnant female bodies are doubly marginalized in internment camps, having no access to proper sanitation or nutrition, and how they are treated as mere tools to stage political dissent.

Er Shi Shi Ji Zhong Guo Ke Huan Xiao Shuo Shi / History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century by Wu Yan (review)

Er Shi Shi Ji Zhong Guo Ke Huan Xiao Shuo Shi / History of Chinese Science Fiction in the 20th Century by Wu Yan (review)

Inventing Patron Saints: The Cult of St Fulk between Civic Reality and Historical Fiction

Seventeenth-century sources attest the cult of English pilgrims in southern Lazio. Focusing on the case of Fulk, I argue that the seventeenth-century tradition is supported neither by the literary accounts nor by topographical analyses. Instead, Fulk’s cult, based on Peter Deacon’s twelfth-century Vita Fulconis, was central in processes of civic formation. Changing religious attitudes in the twelfth/thirteenth century are linked with lay sainthood. An English pilgrim coming back from the Holy Land, through the sanctuary on Mount Gargano, brought great prestige to the urban centre vis-à-vis other urban centres, having visited and, thus, been a witness to some of the greatest places in Christendom.

The Typewriter’s Tale: Re-Exploring the Historical Figure of Henry James through Fiction

This article investigates the relationship between historical fiction, history, and the portrayal of the character and identity of Henry James with specific reference to The Typewriter’s Tale (2005) by Michiel Heyns. Furthermore, it explores how Heyns proceeds to strike a historically responsible balance in his portrayal of the identities of Henry James, Morton Fullerton and Edith Wharton as characters in the novel and the identities of these personae as historical figures. It also explores how Heyns imaginatively bridges the gaps in the historical record or relies on creative licence to reinterpret events and characters. Lastly, the contribution that historical fiction can make to our understanding of the identity and character of historical figures is considered.

A haunting past: British defence, historical narratives, and the politics of presentism

This article examines historical fictions as social processes by which ideas about conflict and warfare are constructed and narrated within society. Focusing on Britain, it explores ‘truth telling’ about the past in an applied context, examining efforts to construct and sustain narratives about Britain’s military past and their role in upholding forms of political and societal consensus that underpin the development and use of military power. We offer a typology of the ways in which Western liberal states shape and mobilise historical fictions within their distinctive forms of militarism and civil-military relations: ‘Telling Stories’—curating and sustaining social understandings of military power through public displays, museums, and ceremonies; ‘Hiding Pasts’—using state power to shape academic research and to occlude aspects of the military past; and ‘Knowing War’—legitimating the state and armed forces’ claims to a monopoly of authoritative knowledge about war and security.

Posthumous Popularity; Fathoming Vincent van Gogh through Select Biofictions

This paper studies a few fictional representations of Vincent van Gogh in contemporary biofiction. The objective of this research is to analyse the life of a genius artist and his posthumous popularity by using the transmedia storytelling technique. Vincent Willem van Gogh, a Dutch painter who lived between 1853 and 1890, is widely regarded as one of the best exponents of post-impressionism. His eccentric life has been a perpetual obsession for creators to fictionally recreate him periodically after his disastrous end in the past hundred years. The paper captures three fictionalised biographical texts in the form of a novel, an animated movie and a documentary that transgress genre boundaries and renegotiate the relationship between historical facts and fiction. Throughout the 21st century, biographical materials, whether they are based on fact or fiction, have made significant contributions to this legend. The sources of the study pivot on three of van Gogh`s biofictions within film and literature; the novel Leaving van Gogh (2011) by Carol Wallace, the documentary Van Gogh: Painted with Words (2010) directed by Andrew Hutton and Loving Vincent (2017), a movie directed by Dorota Kobiela. The creators have taken artistic liberties by altering the stories with more engaging narratives as a way of rewriting the portrayal of the artist through fiction. Biofiction is a category of life writing that includes fictitious biographies and is typically a metafictional narrative in which a biographical subject is the protagonist or plays a significant role in the plot. Transmedia storytelling is an approach to integrating contemporary digital technology to communicate a cohesive narrative across several platforms and mediums. By utilising intermediary allusions and formal imitative techniques, van Gogh`s art, as well as the fundamental principles of artistic creation and his ubiquitous presence in contemporary times are explored.

Troubling White Femininity: Revisiting Delarivier Manley’s The Wife’s Resentment (1720)

In this essay, I use Delarivier Manley’s The Wife’s Resentment (1720) to examine how my own scholarly reading practices more broadly reflect and have helped shape a primarily cis-gendered, overwhelmingly white feminist critical history of amatory fictions of the long eighteenth century. I have previously read Manley’s text primarily as a study in feminist rage: Violenta, the virtuous white protagonist, and Ianthe, a woman of African descent enslaved to Violenta’s family, work together across statuses to dispatch an abusive patriarch. However, Ianthe engages in this labour neither for the sake of Violenta nor to attack the system of gendered and economic violation that results in Violenta’s wrongful ruin, but to liberate herself from enslavement. This micro-critical reflection suggests that the text offers a prequel of contemporary discourses on gendered and racial rage. Whose rage is politically consequential or imaginatively possible? Who gets to enact “understandable” violence even in imaginative literature?

History gone soft: performing the scandalous 1920s in Hollywood Babylon

ABSTRACT Adapted (without permission) from Kenneth Anger’s notorious book about early Hollywood scandals, the 1972 sexploitation version of Hollywood Babylon is a quasi-documentary that alternates between public-domain footage from silent-era films and softcore re-enactments of some of Anger’s most lurid anecdotes. The film’s generic reframing of his dubious stories as late-period sexploitation fodder participates in the book’s mission of desacralizing the stars, but its reticence to include unsimulated sex softens the punch of its scandalous subject matter, while inadvertently flaunting Anger’s fictionalization of history. This article argues that the performances in Hollywood Babylon doubly signal the ‘softness’ of both the filmmakers’ depictions of sex and Anger’s Hollywood lore, compounding the book’s thematic linkage of on-screen decadence, off-screen perversion, and movieland failures.

SCIENTIFIC AND ARTISTIC KNOWLEDGE IN KAZAKH LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN

The article discusses the nature of the scientific and cognitive function of natural history fiction. The authors of the article emphasize that the theme of the relationship between man and nature is still popular in the literary genre. The scientific reasoning emphasizes the emphasis on the mythopoetic basis of Kazakh folklore, in which the scientific, artistic and heuristic beginnings of human exploration of the surrounding world are synthetically presented. The purpose of the study is to present an analytical review of the most representative critical assessment of the natural history of children's literature in Kazakhstan. The illustrative material of the artistic description of local history and natural history is given. In this article, the authors refer to the corpus of historical and modern scientific criticism of children's literature. The practical significance of the problem under study lies in revealing the peculiarities of the development of children's literature in its main genre and style concentra. The authors use a systematic approach that allows them to build the studied material according to a linear-concentric principle, applicable to genre forms of prose and poetry addressed to children. Key words: natural science, animal world, Kazakh children's literature, man and nature, scientific and artistic book.

Fandom, Fanzines, and Archiving Science Fiction Fannish History

This brief history of science fiction (sf) fandom and fanzines focuses on the creation of a zine culture crucial to the split between written sf and media fandom; it also addresses archival holdings of sf and media zines dating from the 1930s on.

Сказание о Мамаевом побоище», «Повесть о разорении Рязани Батыем», Никоновская летопись: о начале русской исторической беллетристики

В статье изучается вопрос о времени появления прямого художественного вымысла в древнерусских произведениях на историческую тему. Рассмотрены три памятника, созданные в один исторический период — в начале XVI в.: «Сказание о Мамаевом побоище» — наиболее пространное произведение из повествующих о Куликовской битве 1380 г., «Повесть о разорении Рязани Батыем», описывающая монгольское нашествие на Рязанскую землю в 1237 г., и Никоновская летопись — летописный свод. Делается вывод, что все они содержат полностью вымышленные эпизоды и сюжеты, из чего следует, что художественный вымысел в историческом повествовании распространяется именно в XVI столетии. Воспринимать «Повесть о разорении Рязани Батыем» и «Сказание о Мамаевом побоище» как источники для изучения нашествия монголов и битвы на Куликовом поле неправомерно. Эти произведения ценны именно как памятники художественной литературы, а не как фиксация реальных событий. Никоновская летопись внесла вымысел и в жанр летописания. Прослеженные явления вполне типичны для литературы начала европейского Нового времени. The article highlights the moments when a fiction takes place in Old Russian sources on History. Examined are three monuments created at the same historical period — at the beginning of the 16th century: the Tale of Mamai’s Battle — one of the most vague narratives on the 1380 Battle of Kulikovo, the Tale of the Destruction of Ryazan by Batu Khan, which talks about the Mongolian Invasion of the Ryazan lands of 1237, and the Nikon Chronicle. A conclusion has been made that all the texts include purely fictitious episodes, which show that artistic fiction in historic narratives is spread in the 16th century. Taking the Tale of Mamai’s Battle and the Tale of the Destruction of Ryazan by Batu Khan as sources for research on the Mongol Invasion and the Battle of Kulikovo is inappropriate. Those works are voluble monuments of fiction literature, but do not depict real historical events. The Nikon Chronicle brought fiction into the chronicle genre. Traced events are typical for literature of the beginning of the modern European history.

The ways of creating historical fiction stories in the Chahar maqala (“Four Discourses”) by Nizami ‘Aruzi Samarqandi (the mid-6/12th cent.)

The article is a part of the research introduction to the new Russian translation of the Chahar maqala (“Four Discourses”) by Nizami ‘Aruzi Samarqandi, scheduled for publication next year as part of the third book in the series The Persian Mirrors for Princes Written in the Saljuq Period: Originals and Fabrications. This article is focused on the textual and literary analysis of the text illustrative and evidentiary base consisting of over 40 entertaining stories. According to the way of creating historical fiction, these stories are divided into five main categories: a) author’s fictions, following a certain structure and added to the formally plausible part of a story; b) author’s concoctions from beginning to end; c) the stories with an event borrowed from somewhere, but provided with an invented plot; d) the autobiographical memories, which stand out with amazing chronological accuracy against the unbelievable background of the first three categories; e) the borrowings from Arabic texts in the author’s translation.