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An edited volume that brings together award-winning historians, novelists, and literary critics to discuss the popularity of historical fiction.
List of contents
- Introduction: Historical Fiction Now
- I. Inventions
- 1: George Saunders: Ghosts in a Graveyard
- 2: Sophie Coulombeau: Naming Names: Reflections on Referentiality in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy
- 3: David Ebershoff: Looking for the Danish Girl
- 4: Michael Lackey: Using Versus Doing History in the Contemporary Biographical Novel
- II. Archives
- 5: Katherine Howe: Real Witches, Real Life
- 6: Tiya Miles: Gardens of Memory: Ghosts, Grounds, and the Archives
- 7: Geraldine Brooks: Pilgrim's Progress: Researching The Secret Chord
- 8: Namwali Serpell: The Afronaut Archives: Reports from a Future Zambia
- 9: Bruce Holsinger: Historical Fiction and the Fine Art of Error
- III. Genres
- 10: Gavin Jones: Historical Fiction, World-building, and the Short Story
- 11: Maaza Mengiste: War in a Woman's Voice
- 12: Mark Eaton: Alternate-history Novels and Other Counterfactual Fictions
- 13: Téa Obreht: Last Camp
- 14: Jessie Burton: Historical Impressionism and Signs of Life: The Blessing and Burden of Writing the Past
- 15: Jane Kamensky: Novelties: A Historian's Field Notes from Fiction
- 16: Naomi J. Williams: Sorting Fact from Fiction: A Novelist Researches the Lapérouse Expedition
- 17: Kirstin Chen: Am I Chinese Enough to Tell this Story?
- Afterword: I Met a Man Who Wasn't There
About the author
Mark Eaton is a Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University and an Associate Research Professor of American Literature at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of
Religion and American Literature Since 1950 (2020).
Bruce Holsinger is the Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of
Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (2001),
The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (2005),
Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (2007), and
The Parchment Inheritance: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (2022). He is also the author of two historical novels:
A Burnable Book (2014) and
The Invention of Fire (2015). His most recent novels are
The Gifted School (2019) and
The Displacements (2022).
Summary
An edited volume that brings together award-winning historians, novelists, and literary critics to discuss the popularity of historical fiction.
