1st Edition
Remaking History The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions
Contents Acknowledgements Permissions Introduction: Perverting History Section One: Ethics, Politics, and Nationalism Chapter One: Reading and Ethics Chapter 2: Challenging national histories Section Two: Haunting, Ghostliness, and the Undead Chapter Three: The materiality of the past Chapter Four: The problem of Time and the return of the Dead Section Three: Pleasure, Affect, and Performance Chapter Five: Pleasure and desire Chapter 6: Performance and Affect Conclusions
Biography
Jerome de Groot is Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester. He is the author of The Historical Novel (2009), Consuming History (2008), and Royalist Identities (Palgrave, 2004).
"Jerome De Groot, who in two previous volumes has done pioneering work on the impact of historical "fictions" on our sense and understanding of the past, carries his brilliant and expansive arguments into brave new realms, from that of Hilary Mantel, to TV’s Mad Men, to night worlds of popular vampire fictions. A must read for anyone interested in what the author rightly calls "new historic encounters, new modes of pastness, a new historicity."
- Robert A Rosenstone, Professor Emeritus of History, California Institute of Technology, USA"Around the complex, deep entanglements of the historical and the fictional a rich body of commentary has gathered. Jerome de Groot's decisive contribution to this follows from the ambitiously diverse scope of his reference points and his sheer critical acuity in exploring the ways in which 'the past' is both produced by, and feeds, imaginings."
- John Corner, University of Leeds, UK"In this wide-ranging study, De Groot (English, Univ. of Manchester, UK) argues that historical fiction has an "uncanny" relationship to the past; that is, it is a genre that makes history simultaneously familiar and alien. Not confining his analysis to novels, De Groot also examines English-language film and television programs (Downton Abbey, Mad Men) to demonstrate how contemporary historical fiction is itself a form of historiography... this is an important contribution to historical fiction studies."
- L. R. Braunstein, Dartmouth College, CHOICE Reviews
