Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Historical Novel NOW
Chapter 1 Early Manifestations and Some Definitions
Jane Porter and Maria Edgeworth
Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels
Theoretical Paradigms: Franco Moretti and Distant Reading
Chapter 2: Developments and expansion
Novelist as Theorist: Alessandro Manzoni
Mary Shelley: romance and temporal experiment
History, theory, popularity
Charlotte Brönte’s experimentation
Novelist as Theorist: George Eliot and realism
The historical novel in America
African American historical novels
Huckleberry Finn, race, and history
Novelist as Theorist: Leo Tolstoy
Chapter 3: Into the Twentieth Century
Theories of the Historical Novel During the Twentieth Century
Theoretical Paradigms: Georg Lukács
Modernism and The End-Of-History Novel
Novelist as theorist: Sylvia Townsend Warner
Chapter 4: Through the century: Romance and Postmodernism
Historical romance
Theoretical Paradigms: Diana Wallace
Postmodernism and Metafiction
Theoretical Paradigms: Linda Hutcheon
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose and Detective Fiction
‘Tap-Dancing on the Edge of the Abyss’: Problematising Postmodernism Through History
Chapter 5: History from the mid-1990s and the post-2000 boom
Novelist as Theorist: Hilary Mantel
New apparatuses and support mechanisms for historical fictions
New and expanded genres
Crime Fiction
Fantasy and alternative histories
Writing the immediate past and the art of simultaneity
Rewriting: revision and parody
The Neo-Victorian, and the Neo-Historical
Novelist as Theorist: W.G. Sebald
Chapter 6: Undoing History
Conservative Historical Fiction
Reclaiming Black and Indigenous histories in America
Novelist as Theorist: Toni Morrison
Reclaiming narratives and rewriting the past
Challenging colonial temporality
Senegalese historical fiction
Novelist as Theorist: Chinua Achebe and anti-colonial writing
Rewriting the past
Theoretical Paradigms: Trauma Theory
New genealogies and roots
Magical Realism and History
Sexual and Gender Diversity in/ and historical novels
Novelist as Theorist: Sarah Waters
Theoretical paradigms: Trans
Climate Emergency and Climate Fiction
Novelist as Theorist: Amitav Ghosh
Appendix: Ways of approaching an historical novel
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Jerome de Groot is Professor of Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester, UK. He is the author of Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions (2015), Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, Second Edition (2016), and Double Helix History: Genetics and the Past (2023).
