The Distant Mirror: Reflections on Young Adult Historical Fiction (review)

The word Reflections in a title suggests that this will be a book in which the authors will approach their matter ruminatively, having considered issues and ideas, having weighed and assessed those, and then having come to conclusions that grow out of wide and varied reading, as well as wise and considered judgment. This is partially true in this study of historical fiction for young adults; certainly there is wide reading here, and a capacious understanding of the issues in writing historical fiction, particularly for a young adult audience. But "ruminative" is not an adjective that applies here, and, at times, "assessment" is not the right noun. In fact, Presentations might have been more appropriate for the subtitle of this book, for while Brown and St. Clair cover the terrain of the field by focusing on its issues and the way those are represented in selected texts, they seem more interested in pointing out the sights than analyzing their meanings, connections, and complexities.

Which is a shame, since the sights they point out are fascinating and important, and the pointing out alone makes this an important book to have on the shelves of undergraduate libraries. But we begin poorly: Their survey of the roots of historical fiction is not especially helpful and rather distorting—we leap from historical writing in the classical period to historical writing in the eighteenth century—which is, admittedly, the century in which history as a science became established, but it's a mighty long leap. Certainly the medieval period had much to say about the writing of history and narration; one need only read Bede to hear his ruminative voice, or Alcuin, or Geoffrey of Monmouth. And the Renaissance need not be ashamed of its contributions, as Sidney's Apology for Poetry challenged the mutual roles of fiction and non-fiction in ways that would have been helpful for later discussions in this book.

Quick tours are never revealing.

But the bulk of this book is given over to "historical fiction as social realism," and here the authors do important work in gathering together the confronting issues: How does historical fiction confront racism? How does historical fiction incorporate issues of faith and spirituality? How does it confront issues of class structure and of gender constructions? How does it examine issues such as immigration? How does it handle history's fascination with war and battle? These are good questions to ask, and Brown and St. Clair are strongest when they are asking them in the context of individual texts—although not when they choose texts from a century ago, which are, every time, set up as easy strawmen. Where they are less strong is when they try to handle the How of those questions in a broader sense.

For one feels throughout this study a fascination with the primary texts, but an underlying dismissal of a more theoretical engagement. This is not to say that the book is problematic because it does not engage with contemporary theoretical concerns; it is to say that a more insightful and engaged approach, a more nuanced approach to the issues themselves would strengthen the examinations of the texts themselves.

For example, the authors never really engage with the issue of definition in this genre, and seem to slide into a sideways glance at definition during the tour when a text calls for it. What specifically is historical fiction? Here the authors include a work in which an author consciously sets his or her plot and characters into an earlier time. Well and good. But how much earlier? Here, the authors might benefit enormously by looking at this through a reader response lens, but their answer is an arbitrary number of years. And what are the boundaries of this genre? Well, this seems rather open. The genre can, in their hands, include works of fantasy, in which a contemporary figure travels back in time to the past. It can include works that consciously change...