Constructing a World
Shakespeare's England and the New Historical Fiction
Publication Year: 2003
Published by: State University of New York Press
cover
Contents
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pp. vii-
Acknowledgments
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pp. ix-
Parts of chapters 1 and 2 originally appeared as “Constructing a World: How the Postmodern Historical Fiction Reimagines the Past” in Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History (25.2, Winter 1996); part of chapter 7 originally appeared as “Creating a Context for Shakespeare with Historical Fiction” ...
Chapter 1 Introduction: Historical Fiction Old and New
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pp. 1-26
In the early 1980s, just as the New Historicists, with their invocation of “the historicity of texts and the textuality of history” were transforming the way readers understood literature, Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose became both a critical success and a bestseller. Widely celebrated as a postmodern historical novel, ...
Chapter 2 Of Narrators; or How the Teller Tells the Tale
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pp. 27-48
The title of this chapter is modeled on several recent historical novelists’ mimicry of the chapter headings or titles used by earlier writers. Bacon, Montaigne, and other sixteenth-century essayists used the “Of ____” formula to organize their essays around a topic or concept; eighteenth-century novelists used the ...
Chapter 3 Historical Novelists at Work: George Garrett and Anthony Burgess
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pp. 49-82
In 1953, when graceful, belletristic essay-writing flourished and popular historical fiction and fiction-biographies provided ordinary readers with a window into the past, a writer for the Sewanee Review named Andrew Nelson Lytle compared the historian and the historical novelist: ...
Chapter 4 Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play and the Origins of English Secular Drama
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pp. 83-102
Among the narratives about Shakespeare there is one that goes something like this: when Shakespeare was born in 1564 secular drama barely existed in England; then, in the 1580s and ’90s, with the help of a few contemporaries like Marlowe, Kyd, and Greene, Shakespeare virtually invented the forms ...
Chapter 5 Fictional Queen Elizabeths and Women-Centered Historical Fiction
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pp. 103-142
Elizabeth I may well be the most written about monarch in Western culture. In an unlikely instance of the cross-fertilization among popular genres, her life has even served as a model in the advice book genre. The jacket blurb of Alan Axelrod’s Elizabeth I CEO: Strategic Lessons from the Leader Who Built an Empire ...
Chapter 6 Rewriting Shakespeare: The Henriad with and without Falstaff
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pp. 143-164
Chapters four and five have addressed some of the counterfactual scenarios, the “what ifs” posed by historical fiction: what if secular drama evolved directly in response to acting companies’ interventions in local events? What if Queen Elizabeth bore a child, or was secretly married, or was vulnerable to blackmail ...
Chapter 7 Teaching Shakespeare’s England through Historical Fiction
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pp. 165-176
The previous chapters have demonstrated, I hope, that writers of historical fiction are inspired to construct and furnish past worlds by a desire to participate in the ongoing revision of what we call “history.” Similarly, the reader’s desire to recover and learn about other times and other places has contributed ...
Notes
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pp. 177-184
Works Cited
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pp. 185-198
Index
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pp. 199-206
E-ISBN-13: 9780791487730
Print-ISBN-13: 9780791455517
Print-ISBN-10: 0791455513
Page Count: 206
Publication Year: 2003
