History is not (or not always) story-shaped, but novels are. Historical fiction has always been popular, though in recent decades it has been enthroned as the form of prestige. Book prizes aside, the question bears asking: how do writers impose narrative structure on historical episodes or events? Are some events, figures, or moments deemed more historic than others? Long understood to be bound up with nationalistic mythmaking, historical fiction has proven an especially attractive vehicle for writers to mount social and political critiques of their own time. This course focuses on mostly British historical fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If historical novels typically tell the story of the nation, how might writers wrest its imaginative power away from the regimes of Official History, especially as that history bears upon ways of thinking about gender, race, and class? What does the weight of historical fidelity do for our understanding of character, plot, style, and genre? Does the historical recency of the narrated action matter for the tone and texture of storytelling? Much more speculatively: what will the historical fiction writers of tomorrow draw on to bring out the vividness of their past, our present? Exploring a wide array of imagined pasts—from early modern England to the Second World War, among others—we will pay particular attention to how texts conjure and contest national myth-making. Alongside our close readings of individual texts we will consider the fate and fluctuating prestige of the historical novel more broadly.
- Teacher: Alexander Millen