The uses of history - some thoughts on historical fiction

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Sparling, Don
Copyright Year	2015
Abstract	Despite the sensational claim made following the collapse of Communism at the beginning of the nineties that we were entering an era marked by "an end to history", the exact reverse has in fact proved to be true. The "return of history" is only too evident, whether in the guise of resurgent nationalism, the growing general interest in historical issues as well as burgeoning numbers of histories and biographies, or—in more strictly literary terms—the sharp increase in good historical fiction and the literary rehabilitation of the genre as such. This is hardly surprising. Since the sixties at least there has been an observable turn to history that has affected a whole spectrum of concerns running from the heri­ tage industry at one end, to culture and gender studies, poststructuralism and postmodernism, at the other. In fact, it could be argued that historicism, in the broadest sense of the word, has been the major cultural and intellectual phe­ nomenon of the past fifty years. One aspect of this change has been the new/renewed respectability accorded historical fiction. The number of leading writers, especially in the Englishspeaking world, who have written first-rate works in this genre in the past thirty years or so is remarkable. It is enough to recall Golding and Farrell, Ackroyd and Barker in England, Styron and Doctorow and Morrison in the United States, Atwood and Ondaatje in Canada, Malouf in Australia. Of particular interest to literary critics has been what many see as a "new", postmodern form of the genre. This is historical fiction of a self-reflexive kind, in which the presence of the author is strongly felt, shaping the fable or commenting on the text itself. Highlighting the difficulty of the task of historical reconstruction, these works implicitly and at times explicitly reveal the way in which every past is our past, our present past, as it were; history here is seen not as a process, a series of events moving forward in time, but rather as a construction, as another kind of
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Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article