Anne Boleyn in Twenty-First-Century Transgeneric Fiction
The democratisation of access to publishing has resulted in the fragmentation of what Anne Boleyn “means” and a dizzying array of potential ways of imagining her story. In the twenty-first century, transgeneric fictions about Anne, in which her story is i
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Anne Boleyn in Twenty-First-Century Transgeneric Fiction
As I argued in the previous chapter, the twenty-first century has seen an extraordinary proliferation of Anne Boleyn fictions, on the back of significant technological changes in book publishing and platforms. The democratisation of access to publishing has meant that what Anne Boleyn “means” has become fragmented and ever more idiosyncratic. It is no longer possible to provide a simple account of how Anne is depicted in fiction because the master narrative of the twentieth century has ruptured into a dizzying array of potential Annes. Alongside this tendency towards fragmentation has arisen a trend towards transgeneric accounts of Anne’s narrative. While Anne’s narrative had usually been confined to the pages of historical romance in the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century it is possible to find her story inscribed in a wide range of generic forms, such as novels about time travel, vampires, and even contemporary American high schools. Transgeneric novels incorporate features from across a variety of genres, and in this chapter, I examine what happens to the historic drama of Anne and Henry’s relationship when it is translated into other genres beyond that of the historical romance. While transgeneric Anne Boleyn fictions might seem strange or unlikely, Anne’s story has always had the capacity to prompt both readers and writers to think about new ways of understanding that narrative in relation to changing social expectations and conventions. As Katherine West Scheil has argued of contemporary fictionalisations of the life of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, speculative biographical fiction has the power to © The Author(s) 2020 S. Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_10
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“destabiliz[e] prevailing narratives” and “encourag[e] communities of readers to rethink the certainty of various biographical premises.”1 Similarly, transgeneric Anne Boleyn fictions seek to destabilise our understanding of who Anne was and what she means, often in quite explicitly reactionary ways. Many of the novels examined here express dissatisfaction with the historic record, or prevailing ways of thinking about Anne in fiction, and actively seek to present a new Anne for the twenty-first century. Many of the transgeneric novels about Anne are essentially thought experiments. What would happen if Anne Boleyn could time travel? What would Anne be like if she lived now? If you could talk to Anne Boleyn’s ghost, what would she say? What if Anne Boleyn didn’t die in 1536? Combining historical fiction with science fiction, or Young Adult fiction, or the counterfactual, allows potential answers to these tantalising questions to be posited. What unites all these disparate accounts of Anne is the conviction that Anne Boleyn continues to mean something in the twenty-first century, even if that meaning itself is disputed and often contradictory.
Anne Boleyn Young Adult Fiction While children’s lit
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