Reading historical fiction: the revenant and remembered past

The essays gathered together in Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past examine historical fiction from the eighteenth century to the present day.

The collection addresses a number of focal points in recent scholarly debates about the genre, including defining and locating its origins, the formal distinctions between early historical fiction and modern examples, and the implications of different modes for representing the past, such as critical distance and affective identification.

The essays bring a fresh perspective to these debates by shifting focus to the role readers play in mediating the relationship between past, present and future.

The collection includes essays that concentrate on a range of texts by authors such as Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, John Fowles and A.S.

Byatt, together with work by authors not usually considered in studies of historical fiction, such as William Morris, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Ann Radcliffe, and Sophie Gee.

The essays examine the range of interpretative positions that can be assumed in relationship to the past, and situate historical novels, plays and poems in relation to scholarly historical narratives, mythologies and visual representations of history.

Structured to resist conventional literary periodisation, the collected essays imitate fiction's own formal multi-perspectivity, bringing claims about historical representations and the methodologies used to examine them to bear on each other.