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Descendants of Waverley

Romancing History in Contemporary Historical Fiction

Martha F. Bowden

Descendants of Waverley examines contemporary novelists’ combination of historical authority and narrative art to create authentic and accessible depictions of the past. This technique, the “romance of history,” challenges conventional theories that the novel as a genre erased the romance. Individual chapters establish the critical framework, analyze the strategies that authors use to romance history, and demonstrate the subgenres that exist in current historical fiction. While the author does not consider Walter Scott to be the inventor of historical fiction, she demonstrates the ways in which contemporary fiction’s techniques reflect the form of the genre that Scott both developed and theorized in the Waverley novels (1814–1832). In writing his “historical romances,” Scott drew on the forms of the fictions that preceded his work, especially Gothic fiction, and was influenced by the fluid definitions of “romance” that permeated the theorizing of the novel and its development in the eighteenth century, where fiction was described as evolving from and replacing romances and referred to as “romances” themselves. She begins by tracing this history and moves on to discuss contemporary fiction, both as technique, in the uses of intertextuality, and in as form, in the increasing hybridity of contemporary fiction. This hybridity is reflected in such forms as the historical detective novel, the embedded narrative, and the biographical novel; the pedagogical elements inherent in the historical novel before Scott’s oeuvre continue into the present. The book ends with the recent phenomenon of historical fantasy; in this subgenre, the traits of more conventional historical fiction, such as intertextuality and the tension between the familiar and strange, combine with a playful form of fantasy that releases revenants among the Luddites and wizards into the Battle of Waterloo.

John Frow’s theory of the slipperiness of genre is a critical component for explicating the most recent metamorphoses of historical fiction. The critical framework also develops from recent and eighteenth-century histories of the novel, twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of Scott’s influence, and contemporary writers’ own reflections on what they do when they write historical novels.

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 262 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-1-61148-782-4 • Hardback • August 2016 • $129.00 • (£99.00)

978-1-61148-784-8 • Paperback • March 2018 • $57.99 • (£45.00)

978-1-61148-783-1 • eBook • August 2016 • $55.00 • (£42.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism / Modern / 19th Century, Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century, Literary Criticism / Modern / 21st Century

Descendants of Waverley

Romancing History in Contemporary Historical Fiction

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Descendants of Waverley examines contemporary novelists’ combination of historical authority and narrative art to create authentic and accessible depictions of the past. This technique, the “romance of history,” challenges conventional theories that the novel as a genre erased the romance. Individual chapters establish the critical framework, analyze the strategies that authors use to romance history, and demonstrate the subgenres that exist in current historical fiction. While the author does not consider Walter Scott to be the inventor of historical fiction, she demonstrates the ways in which contemporary fiction’s techniques reflect the form of the genre that Scott both developed and theorized in the Waverley novels (1814–1832). In writing his “historical romances,” Scott drew on the forms of the fictions that preceded his work, especially Gothic fiction, and was influenced by the fluid definitions of “romance” that permeated the theorizing of the novel and its development in the eighteenth century, where fiction was described as evolving from and replacing romances and referred to as “romances” themselves. She begins by tracing this history and moves on to discuss contemporary fiction, both as technique, in the uses of intertextuality, and in as form, in the increasing hybridity of contemporary fiction. This hybridity is reflected in such forms as the historical detective novel, the embedded narrative, and the biographical novel; the pedagogical elements inherent in the historical novel before Scott’s oeuvre continue into the present. The book ends with the recent phenomenon of historical fantasy; in this subgenre, the traits of more conventional historical fiction, such as intertextuality and the tension between the familiar and strange, combine with a playful form of fantasy that releases revenants among the Luddites and wizards into the Battle of Waterloo.

John Frow’s theory of the slipperiness of genre is a critical component for explicating the most recent metamorphoses of historical fiction. The critical framework also develops from recent and eighteenth-century histories of the novel, twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of Scott’s influence, and contemporary writers’ own reflections on what they do when they write historical novels.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Bucknell University Press

Pages: 262 • Trim: 6½ x 9¼

978-1-61148-782-4 • Hardback • August 2016 • $129.00 • (£99.00)

978-1-61148-784-8 • Paperback • March 2018 • $57.99 • (£45.00)

978-1-61148-783-1 • eBook • August 2016 • $55.00 • (£42.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism / Modern / 19th Century, Literary Criticism / Modern / 20th Century, Literary Criticism / Modern / 21st Century

Author

Martha F. Bowden is professor of English at Kennesaw State University.

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsIntroduction
PART I: WALTER SCOTT AND THE ROMANCE OF HISTORY1 Walter Scott and Contemporary Historical Fiction, or ’Tis Two Hundred Years Since
2 The Romance of History

PART II: CREATING AUTHENTICITY THROUGH INTERTEXTUALITY3 Intertextuality and Authenticity: The Art of the Significant Reference
4 The Picture in the Parlor: History Painting, Portraiture, and the Romance of History

PART III: THE METAMORPHOSIS OF THE HISTORICAL ROMANCE5 Bodies Changed into Other Bodies: Variety of Forms in Contemporary Historical Fiction
6 The Biographical Romance
7 The Historical Novel at Play

Bibliographies

Reviews

Walter Scott’s works shaped historical fiction as we now know it, and Bowden (Kennesaw State Univ.) argues that, far from abandoning Scott’s parameters, contemporary historical novelists continue to work within them. Above all, what novelists have inherited from Scott is “romance,” which counterpoints the past’s difference by evoking otherwise unrecorded individual emotions and a sense of “wonder.” For Bowden, this interplay of emotion, wonder, and authenticity makes a successful historical novel—one that, as she repeatedly says, can illuminate the “grey spaces” of individual lives otherwise left obscure. She praises historically appropriate intertextual and visual references (such as Jane Stevenson’s use of Othello and Susan Sontag’s of portraits of Emma Hamilton); argues that yoking the historical novel to other genres, like detective fiction or the Gothic, brings lost stories of personal life into a historical framework; demonstrates that biographical fiction can make the historically predetermined life of a figure like Aphra Behn “strange” once more; and suggests that historical fantasies like Lisa See's Peony in Love (2007) and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004) narrate aspects of cultural or historical difference that resist straightforward, realist representation. An accessible, unapologetically evaluative study. Summing Up:Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
— Choice Reviews

Bowden's book offers many innovative insights.... This book resembles an encyclopedia, something for everyone, with intriguing comments and examples as we go along.
— The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer

Descendants of Waverley

Romancing History in Contemporary Historical Fiction

Martha F. Bowden

Descendants of Waverley

Romancing History in Contemporary Historical Fiction

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