Re-visioning Historical Fiction for Young Readers: The Past through Modern Eyes by Kim Wilson (review)

In her introduction, Kim Wilson begins with an issue many historians have raised about historical fiction: its adherence to a "sense" or "spirit" of the past over "an accurate depiction of that age," as though historical facts "may get in the way of 'essentialism'" (1-2). Her monograph follows this opening stance by being constantly faithful to the idea of representing history accurately, which includes revealing its lacunae, and putting forth the values of the past in a non-anachronistic way. Wilson draws on a wide corpus for evidence: children's historical fiction from the 1960s to today, primarily in English, with a select few texts translated from French, Italian, and Japanese. She argues that historical fiction for young readers focalizes the past through the framework of modern criteria of judgment, generating a sense of the superiority of the modern world and marginalizing the otherness of the past. The problems of imposing anachronistic values onto the past in historical fiction are compounded when this fiction is targeted at children, due to "its typically didactic function" (64). She looks at this imposition of modern ideology on the past in relation to the "Living history novel" (as defined below), a particular historical figure (Joan of Arc), and the representation of women, national identity, war, and multiculturalism.

In her first chapter, Wilson discusses texts that explicitly connect the present to the past through narrative techniques such as time slips, ghosts, and past/present parallel narratives. She creates a subgenre of historical fiction, the "Living history novel," in order to expand the conventional subgenre of time-travel narratives to include other kinds of narratives that relate the present to the past in comparable ways (11). The name of this subgenre is derived from the performances of the past that take place at living history museums and events (15, 22). The Living history novel, of all the kinds of historical fiction, most explicitly relates the past to the present, but consistently does so by focalizing through the present: "It lures readers to align uncritically with modern perception" (11).

Chapter two focuses on representations of Joan of Arc in children's historical fiction. There are many lacunae in the historical accounts of Joan's life, and these give fiction writers an unusually large scope to imagine events and invent narratives for her (40). Further, the fiction Wilson discusses here often makes no attempt to distinguish between fact and fiction--they are too subtly blended for the difference to be clear to an uninformed reader. This lends a dubious facticity to the portrayal of a reduced sexism in the past (56), the narrative certainty of Joan's sacredness (45), and the sense in all of these texts that Joan did not truly want to dress as a boy (48).

In chapter three, Wilson discusses representations of women in children's historical fiction--particularly in cross-dressing stories, woman pirate stories, and female slave narratives. These texts endow women with a far greater agency than they historically had, and do not show the severe consequences that their transgressive and rebellious actions would have received (74). Wilson's concern with this presentation of female agency in the past is that it underplays the struggles that past women really faced, suggesting that individual women could have overcome oppression if they had only had the courage, and providing "a false mapping of the route to gendered equality" (98).

Chapter four focuses on the highly acclaimed Historical Journal series to explore how different nations--New Zealand, North America, Canada, and Australia--represent key moments in their national histories, in aid of the construction of national identities (105). In each case, the texts focalize through what were in truth marginal if at all extant perspectives (124-25), and marginalize genuinely mainstream perspectives of their time. In doing so, they present what are now seen as national values as having always been in their nation's history, with the...