Historical fiction is a
genre
in which the plot is set amidst historical events, or more
generally, in which the author uses real events but adds a
fictional character.
Overview
Historical fiction may center on historical or on fictional
characters, but usually represents an honest attempt based on
considerable research (or at least serious reading) to tell a story
set in the historical past as understood by the author's
contemporaries. Those historical settings may not stand up to the
enhanced knowledge of later historians.
An early example is
Luó
Guànzhōng's
14th-century
Romance of the Three
Kingdoms, which covers one of the most important periods
of
Chinese history.
The historical novel was popularized in the
19th century by artists classified as
Romantics. Many regard
Sir Walter Scott as the first to have used
this
technique, in his novels of
Scottish history such as
Waverley (1814) and
Rob Roy (1818). His
Ivanhoe (1820) gains credit for
renewing interest in the
Middle Ages.
Victor Hugo's
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1831) furnishes another early example of the historical novel as
does Leo Tolstoy's
War and
Peace.
Many early historical novels played an important role in the
rise of European popular interest
in the history of the
Middle Ages.
Hugo's
Hunchback often receives credit for fueling the movement
to save Gothic architecture in
France
, leading to the establishment of the Monuments
historiques, the French governmental authority for historic preservation.
Historical fiction has also served to encourage movements of
romantic nationalism. A series
of novels by
Józef Ignacy
Kraszewski on the history of Poland popularized the country's
history after it had lost its independence in the
Partitions of Poland.
Subsequently the
Polish
winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize in literature,
Henryk Sienkiewicz, wrote several
immensely popular novels set in conflicts between the Poles and
predatory Teutonic Knights,
rebelling Cossacks and invading Swedes
. (He
also penned a once wildly popular novel about Nero's Rome and the
early Christians,
Quo
Vadis, which has been filmed several times.)
Scott's
Waverley novels ignited interest in Scottish
history and
still illuminate it. Sigrid Undset's
Kristin Lavransdatter
fulfilled a similar function for Norwegian history
; Undset later won a Nobel Prize for Literature
(1928).
The genre
of the historical novel has also permitted some authors, such as
the Polish novelist
Bolesław Prus in his sole
historical novel, Pharaoh, to
distance themselves from their own time and place in order to gain
perspective on society and on the human
condition, or to escape the depredations of the censor.
In some historical novels the main historic events take place
mostly off-stage, while the characters inhabit the world in which
those events are occurring.
Robert
Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped recounts mostly private
adventures set against the backdrop of the Jacobite troubles in Scotland.
Charles Dickens'
Barnaby Rudge is set amid the
Gordon Riots, and
A Tale of Two Cities in the
French Revolution.
Other authors give historic characters a fictional setting, as in
Alexandre Dumas'
Queen Margot and
Thomas Pynchon's
Mason & Dixon.
Historical fiction can serve
satirical
purposes. An example is
George MacDonald Fraser's tales of
the dashing cad, poltroon, and bounder Sir
Harry Paget Flashman.
The historical novel has continued to remain popular with authors
to this day as with the wildly popular
Patrick O'Brian's
Aubrey–Maturin series. The
most striking development in British/Irish writing in the past 25
years has been the renewed interest in the
First World War. Works include
William Boyd's
An Ice-Cream War;
Sebastian Faulks'
The Girl at the Lion d'Or
(concerned with the War's consequences) and
Birdsong;
Pat
Barker's
Regeneration
Trilogy and
Sebastian
Barry's
A Long Long
Way.
Authors of the past
Living authors
- Ann Rinaldi, writing YA historical
fiction; (Time Enough For Drums, A Break with Charity. She writes
usually with female protagonists in the first person, set in
Colonial - Civil War era America or WW1 era. Critically acclaimed
and admired.
- Mark Turnbull, author of Decision
Most Deadly, a novel set in London during 1641, as England plunged
into civil war.
- Writing as "William
Irish," Cornell Woolrich
published Waltz into
Darkness (1947), set in 1880 New Orleans
. Interestingly, both film versions —
François Truffaut's La
Sirène du Mississippi (Mississippi Mermaid, 1969) and
Michael Cristofer's Original Sin (2001) — place the
action at a later time (and elsewhere).
- George Leonardos Author of
historical Novels, such the trilogy for the Byzantine The
Palaeologian Dynasty. The
Rise and Fall of Byzantium, "Mara, The Christian Sultana", the
stepmother of Mehmed II the Conqueror,
"Barbarossa the Pirate", "The Sleeping Beauty of Mystras
etc.
- Linda Proud has been acclaimed for
the depth of her research in recreating Renaissance Florence, particularly the
philosophical currents that informed the work of Botticelli, in A Tabernacle for the Sun,
Pallas and the Centaur and The Rebirth of Venus.
http://www.lindaproud.com/
- Albert A. Bell, Jr. writes mysteries set in the Roman Empire
with Pliny the younger as sleuth and Tacitus as sidekick. See
All Roads Lead to Murder.
http://www.albertbell.com/
- T.C. Boyle's
The Road to Wellville
(1993), set in 1907, tells the story of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of
cornflakes, and his Battle Creek
Sanitarium
.
- Colleen McCullough has
written the famous Masters of Rome series which deals with
the end of the great Roman Republic and great personalities like
Caesar, Gaius Marius and Sulla.
- John Jakes has written the
best-selling North and South
Trilogy on the life and times of members of two families during
the American Civil war and also The Kent Family
Chronicles.
- Gillian Bradshaw, a classical scholar, writes historical
fiction set in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the Duchy of Brittany, the Byzantine Empire, Saka
and the Greco-Bactrian
Kingdom, Imperial Rome, Sub-Roman Britain and Roman Britain.
- Kazuo Ishiguro's novel
The Remains of the
Day (1989), set in 1956, explains in flashback the dubious history
of (fictitious) 1930s Darlington Hall and its
association with Nazi Germany.
- Patrick Redmond's The Wishing Game (1999) provides a
thrilling depiction of life in a strict and uncanny boarding school in 1950s rural Norfolk,
England.
- Julie Myerson's novel Laura Blundy (2000) is set in Victorian London.
- Bernard Cornwell is one of
today's best-known historical novelists, with his Sharpe and
The Warlord
Chronicles.
- Conn Iggulden is also a well known
historical-fiction author of the widely acclaimed Emperor
series, The Conqueror series and the Dangerous Book
for Boys, although it should be noted that the
Emperor series is best known for its gross historical
inaccuracies.
- Jonathan Coe's novel The Rotters' Club (2001)
evokes 1970s Britain.
- Cecelia Holland has written over
twenty novels set in various parts of Europe, Asia and the United
States in many periods.
- The bulk of Gore Vidal's novels have
historical settings, including Burr, which has gained a wider readership
than any biography of Aaron Burr.
- Neal Stephenson's series
The Baroque Cycle
(Quicksilver,
The Confusion, and
The System of the
World), published in 2003 and 2004, deals with the rise of
the scientific worldview and the beginnings of modern capitalism in
late 17th and early 18th century Europe.
- The James Reasoner
Civil War Series is a 10-volume set of historical novels set in
Culpeper, Virginia.
- Amita Kanekar's A Spoke in the Wheel is a novel about
the Buddha and his disciples, that
alternates between the time of the Buddha, i.e. about 566 BCE, and
the time of Ashoka the Great, i.e.
about 250 BCE.
- Marianne Curley. Her books
Old Magic and the Guardians of Time Trilogy all take
place partially in the past.
- Umberto Eco's novels, most notably
his most famous, The Name of the
Rose, are historical novels, taking place in Medieval or Early
Modern Europe.
- Marie-Elena John is a Caribbean
writer whose debut novel Unburnable gives
a slice of social history of the Caribbean, focusing on the African
origins of Caribbean culture.
- Arturo Pérez-Reverte
is the Spanish author of the Captain
Alatriste novels and other historical novels.
- Robert Harris has
written three historical novels so far: Enigma, set in World War II, and Pompeii and Imperium, both set in Ancient Rome.
- Courtney Thomas's Walls of Phantoms accurately
documents the daily news events of 1989 - including providing the
historical framework of what lead to these events - in this
meticulously wrought epic.
- Anurag Kumar's Recalcitrance, set in the Great Uprising
or Indian Mutiny of 1857
- Michael Goodspeed's
Three to a Loaf, a
carefully researched and highly readable Canadian spy novel
illustrates the societies as well as the lives and attitudes of
Allied and German soldiers locked in the cauldron of the Western
Front.
- Thomas Pynchon's three novels
Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day are historical, and they
variously contrast outrageous personal, subjective, hallucinogenic
or even supernatural events with very real, well-researched
accuracies from the past.
- Tim Powers's novels, or many of them,
for example Declare, are meticulously
researched historical novels which slip supernatural factors into
the aspects of the history which are un-documented or little
known.
- S.J.A.Turney's 2009 debut, Marius' Mules, based on Julius
Caesar's invasion of Gaul, viewed from the perspective of a
Legionary commander.
- Sandra Worth is an award-winning
author of historical novels set during England's 15th c. Wars of the Roses including The Rose of
York trilogy (published 2003-2007), Lady of the Roses: A Novel of
the Wars of the Roses (2008) and The King’s Daughter: A Novel of
the First Tudor Queen, Elizabeth of
York (2008).
- Rimi B. Chatterjee, set her second novel
The City of Love in
sixteenth century Malaysia, Burma and Bengal and dealt with spice
traders, pirates, tantrics and sufis. Parts of her third novel
Black Light are set in the fourth and second centuries
BCE, the seventh century and the early twentieth century.
Theory and Criticism
The
Marxist literary critic, essayist, and
social theorist
György
Lukács wrote extensively on the aesthetic and political
significance of the historical novel. In 1937's
der historische Roman, published
originally in Russian, Lukács developed critical readings of
several historical novels by authors including Keller, Dickens, and
Flaubert. For him, the advent of the "genuinely" historical novel
at the beginning of the 19th century is to be read in terms of two
developments, or processes. First, the development of a specific
genre in a specific medium: the development of the historical
novel's unique stylistic and narrative elements. Secondly, the
development of a representative, organic artwork capable of
capturing the fractures, contradictions, and problems of the
particular productive mode of its time [i.e. developing, early,
entrenched capitalism].
See also
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