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Chapter 1 Introduction Historical Fiction Old and New I n 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, this dazzling mixture of “thick” historical research and popular detective fiction elements invited its readers to view historical fiction as an academically respectable genre, and a vehicle for recovering and reimagining the past in unconventional ways. A few years later, Eco responded to published commentary on his novel in an eclectic text called Postscript to The Name of the Rose.1 Originally published as an eighty-page mixture of short, fragmentary chapters, photographs, and illustrations of medieval architecture and manuscripts , the Postscript is partly a “poetics” designed to “help us understand how to solve the technical problem which is the production of a work” (Eco, Name of the Rose 508). Eco explains how the historical fiction writer must become immersed in historical evidence: to tell a story, “you must first of all construct a world, furnished as much as possible, down to the slightest detail” (512). In his case, this required committing himself to a specific date, reading architectural plans and registers of the holdings of medieval libraries, and even counting the steps in a fourteenth-century stairway. Eco’s Postscript is also a manifesto proclaiming the authority to which serious historical fiction can lay claim: the characters in a historical novel may not appear in 1 2 Constructing a World encyclopedias, he notes, but everything they do could only occur in that time and place. Made-up events and characters tell us things “that history books have never told us so clearly,” so as “to make history, what happened, more comprehensible.” By reimagining the past, the novelist thus performs the analytical role of the historian, by “not only identify[ing] in the past the causes of what came later, but also trac[ing] the process through which those causes began slowly to produce their effects” (534). In constructing a world, the novelist also “constructs a reader,” for one important difference between serious and formulaic historical fiction, Eco says, is that innovative historical fiction like The Name of the Rose “seeks to produce a new reader” whereas formulaic fiction “tries to fulfill the wishes of the readers already to be found in the street” (522–23). In the years since Eco’s novel appeared, a number of contemporary novelists , most of whom are not exclusively or even principally known as writers of historical fiction, have been similarly immersing themselves in the language , the texts, and the material culture of the past, and have produced some remarkable works of fiction. What they share with the New Historicists—and what distinguishes their novels from traditional or “classic” historical fictions and allies them with postmodern fictions—are a resistance to old certainties about what happened and why; a recognition of the subjectivity , the uncertainty, the multiplicity of “truths” inherent in any account of past events; and a disjunctive, self-conscious narrative, frequently produced by eccentric and/or multiple narrating voices. Postmodern fictions frequently play genres off against one another, making fluid the boundaries between novel and autobiography, novel and history, novel and biography, and combining different “registers of discourse,” to use Linda Hutcheon’s term (such as the mix of literary-historical, theological-philosophical, and populardetective -fiction discourses in The Name of the Rose). At times, Hutcheon adds, such fictions are “formally parodic” in their “critical or ironic re-reading of the past,” but as historical fictions, they are nevertheless “modelled on historiography to the extent that [they are] motivated and made operative by a notion of history as a shaping force” (4, 9–10, 23, 113). Historical fiction as a genre has always borrowed freely from other genres. It shares some characteristics with each of the mass-culture genres— the romance, the western, fantasy, detective fiction—but generally lacks the pronounced formulas and predictable conventions of those genres. Often, historical fictions have masqueraded as exemplars of other literary forms, such as the memoir, the biography, the autobiography, the epistolary novel. In contrast to those historical novelists who employ the conventions of the panoramic realistic novel, with its large cast of characters and detailed descriptions of place and the accoutrements of daily life, the more innovative writers tend to blur the...

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