Historical Novel

Abstract

In Britain, the term ‘historical novel’ was attached to the title pages of fictional narratives (often French romances in translation) from at least the seventeenth century. In the Romantic period, largely as a result of the popularity of Walter Scott's novels, readers and critics began to think of the ‘historical novel’ as a distinct genre. Since then the form and value of the genre have been much debated. Scott's Waverley novels have been treated either as a norm or as a monopolizing presence that obscures the works of his predecessors and contemporaries. The most influential discussion, by the Hungarian Marxist Gyorgy Lukács, locates the origins of the historical novel in the turmoil generated by the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, which made ‘history a mass experience’ (1962: 27). Lukács links progress with class struggle, and associates history with public events such as wars and uprisings; he finds in writers like Scott an ‘honest’ representation of this understanding of history. While some later critics have echoed Lukács's assumptions, others have seen them as tending to marginalize works by those writers (including many women) whose experience of history may seem repetitive and circular rather than progressive, and who may approach history through private subjects (such as the family saga) with little or no reference to public events (e.g., Wallace 2005). More recent work has begun to recover historical novels obscured by the singular focus on Scott. The field of historical fiction in this period is in fact so crowded and diverse that the following discussion is necessarily selective.