Re-Visioning Historical Fiction for Young Readers: The Past Through Modern Eyes (review)

This book examines the ideological implications of a range of English language children’s historical fiction published within the last thirty years, particularly focusing on the way that present ideological concerns shape the past that we present to children. Largely confining her discussion to work published within the last thirty years or so, to English language texts and to work published in Australia, Kim Wilson looks at a different aspect of her subject in each of her six chapters.

In her first chapter, Wilson proposes a new term, “Living History Fiction,” to refer to books whose modern protagonists are brought into direct contact with the past, either physically or psychically. More inclusive than “Time Slip,” which she places as a sub-genre of her new category, Living History Fiction also includes the appearance of ghosts and intimations of parallel lives in the past. In these works, despite their intention to immerse their protagonists and readers in the life of the past, Wilson detects a common concern with the past as an agent in the development of its young protagonists’ identity in the present.

Wilson’s next two chapters examine a group of novels about the life of Joan of Arc and the more general, but related, issue of the portrayal of female agency in historical fiction. In both cases, she discovers that “anachronistic ideologies” are superimposed on historical representations, and that the demands of modern feminism have distorted the perception and portrayal of women’s lives in the past. Her final three chapters show how children’s historical fiction reflects and shapes notions of national identity. She looks at the series of books in the form of historical journals published by Scholastic about ten years ago and finds, in titles that describe settler lives in Canada, Australia and the U.S.A., a reinforcement of notions of each nation’s core values and its character. Her final two chapters focus on Australia, revealing the part that children’s historical fiction has played in constructing national identity from memories of twentieth century conflicts and its role in the contemporary debate over immigration policy and the nature of multiculturalism in Australia.

This is an important book. Wilson is deeply critical of her subject, gathering support from scholars who find historical fiction inadequate as either literature or history, and she implicitly worries about the way it might shape the attitudes of young readers. Yet her consideration of children’s historical fiction as a wider cultural phenomenon reveals its relationship to contemporary social and political developments in a way that no previous scholarship has. Other members of IBBY, surely a humanist organisation in origin and philosophy, may bridle, as I do, at Wilson’s sporadic reductionist, and implicitly pejorative, references to misguided “humanistic” notions of “positive progression.”