Historical Fiction Now

Historical Fiction Now brings together prominent authors, scholars, and critics of historical fiction to explore the genre's character, fortunes, and potential in the twenty-first century.

Gathering together the voices of novelists, critics, academics, and several authors writing across these categories, the volume explores the nature of reading, writing, and writing about historical fiction in the present moment while meditating on some of the myriad contexts of the genre.

What inspires writers to choose particular moments, events, and personalities as the subjects of their fictional imaginings, and with what implications for their readers' understanding of the present? How do contemporary scholars approach the making and reception of historical fiction, and how do these approaches resonate with writers' own preoccupations in the process of invention? What might scholars of a genre with a long and complex history learn from its contemporary practitioners? Conversely, how do novelists understand their own historical fictions (if at all) in relation to the theoretical and critical traditions shaping the work of their academic colleagues?

The collection features an original essay by Hilary Mantel on the making of the Wolf Hall trilogy as well as contributions from internationally known novelists such as George Saunders, Namwali Serpell, Maaza Mengiste, and Téa Obreht, among others.

Mark Eaton, Professor of English, Azusa Pacific University and Research Associate Professor of American Literature, Claremont Graduate University,Bruce Holsinger, Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English, University of Virginia

Mark Eaton is a Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University and a Research Associate Professor of American Literature at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Religion and American Literature Since 1950 (2020).

Bruce Holsinger is the Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (2001), The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (2005), Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (2007), and The Parchment Inheritance: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (2022). He is also the author of two historical novels: A Burnable Book (2014) and The Invention of Fire (2015). His most recent novels are The Gifted School (2019) and The Displacements (2022).

Introduction: Historical Fiction Now, Bruce Holsinger
I. Inventions
1. Ghosts in a Graveyard, George Saunders
2. Naming Names: Reflections on Referentiality in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall Trilogy, Sophie Coulombeau
3. Looking for the Danish Girl, David Ebershoff
4. Using Versus Doing History in the Contemporary Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey
II. Archives
5. Real Witches, Real Life, Katherine Howe
6. Gardens of Memory: Ghosts, Grounds, and the Archives, Tiya Miles
7. Pilgrim's Progress: Researching The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks
8. The Afronaut Archives: Reports from a Future Zambia, Namwali Serpell
9. Historical Fiction and the Fine Art of Error, Bruce Holsinger
III. Genres
10. Historical Fiction, World-building, and the Short Story, Gavin Jones
11. War in a Woman's Voice, Maaza Mengiste
12. Alternate-history Novels and Other Counterfactual Fictions, Mark Eaton
13. Last Camp, Téa Obreht
14. Historical Impressionism and Signs of Life: The Blessing and Burden of Writing the Past, Jessie Burton
15. Novelties: A Historian's Field Notes from Fiction, Jane Kamensky
16. Sorting Fact from Fiction: A Novelist Researches the Lapérouse Expedition, Naomi J. Williams
17. Am I Chinese Enough to Tell this Story?, Kirstin Chen
Afterword: I Met a Man Who Wasn't There, The late Hilary Mantel