In Search of Englishness: A Study of the Historical Novel during the Victorian Era

Abstract

Historical novels are not only the legitimate progeny of a nation's becoming conscious of its own identity, they also contribute to fortify that nationalist discourse. In a sense, the very beginning of the historical novel is entwined with the emergence of a widespread consciousness about the idea of nation(-hood); nevertheless, studies of the historical novel (and its relation and contribution to national identity) have remained under-investigated. The abiding aim of the present study is thus to examine this relationship, to draw attention to historical and cultural dimensions of Englishness. The present paper examines the influence of national ideology on fictional historiography, and focuses on the ways some English novelists, during the Victorian era, have reflected upon their Englishness.Keywords: Englishness; the nation; history; the historical novel; the Victorian era.Representations of the past play a vital role in establishing images of identity-and indeed, identities of both place and people.-Andrew Higson, Film England (2010: 191) Since the rise of the English novel in the early 18 th century, an interest in history and the historical has been recognizable. It was partly due to the fact that before the emergence of the novel 'historiography' has been the most important prose genre. Yet, while a historian may make general statements about periods or characters to examine the nexus of past events and the processes of their development, the novelist will make particularized statements, re-imagining, in an inexhaustible manner, what it might be felt like living in the past, in another era. For example, the "I" that opens Daniel Defoe's classic Robinson Crusoe (1719)-set "in the year 1632, in the city of York"-particularizes the geographical and the historical reality of 17 th -century England:

Interrelation of History and Nationhood in Contemporary Persian Historical Fiction

“…In the same vein, the rise of the historical novel in Iran was concomitant with Iran's Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which was hailed by many a critic and historian as a major time of sociopolitical awakening. 3 In the years leading up to the Constitutional Revolution (1905)(1906)(1907)(1908)(1909)(1910)(1911), at the very beginning of the twentieth century, many literary circles emerged in different corners of Iran, and modern authors, firmly opposed to court poets who were given to translating the ideology of feudal aristocracy, tried their hands at writing novels -the new literary genre whose audience were the working-class people, not the nobility. These novelists were the main activists of the 'literary revolution,' and their first task was to break away from the usual feudal themes and the old hackneyed forms and subjects.…”

“…The preface to this novel is worthy of attention as it is a short manifesto of socialist novels. It argues in favor of the revolutionary and reformist function of the novel 3. Edward Granville Browne (1862-1926) effectively described it as "an Iranian awakening -drawing explicit comparisons with the Italian Risorgimento" [1.…”