Parke Godwin and the Lessons of History

Authors of historical fiction claim that their work restores a narrative of meaning to the past, and that it recovers the experiences of those individuals or groups who have been excluded from the formal historical record. This two-fold function is particularly important to Parke Godwin, who suggests that, to recreate the past, the storyteller must be willing both to utilize and to go against the historical record. He positions himself as a kind of ‘pagan,’ resurrecting an older, more ‘authentic’ world to which he postulates Arthur belonged.