Historical Fiction and Wreckage: Hilary Mantel and Amitav Ghosh
The type of historical fiction discussed in this book is “literary” rather than “popular” in depicting historical loss without remedy. Theorists of historical fiction have focused on its political content or self-reflexive form; recent critical approaches
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Historical Fiction and Wreckage: Hilary Mantel and Amitav Ghosh
Historical fiction has been published around the world in the last quarter century. This chapter identifies the type of contemporary historical fiction analyzed in this book as, first, “literary” rather than “popular” in its representation of wreckage without immediate or easy consolation. Turning then to analysis of literary historical fiction, the chapter argues that historical fiction “after the wreck” revises the understandings and uses of both history and fiction. It makes an overtly political critique of state exceptionalism and self-justifying nationalism, while consciously using artistic strategies to make vivid the human consequences of state violence. A section on recent critical approaches to contemporary historical fiction argues that exploration of complex postmodernist forms has taken precedence over analysis of the fiction’s content; as a result, the distinctive kind of historical fiction exploring “wreckage” has remained invisible, together with its connection to the longstanding political concerns that characterize historical fiction. Contrasts between two recent trilogies by Hilary Mantel and Amitav Ghosh establish differences between literary historical fictions that reflect on wreckage and others that recover heroism and positive developments in history. Mantel’s trilogy recovers the origins of modern British democracy in the sixteenth century, while Ghosh’s re-creates the catastrophic opium trade of the nineteenth century with the wreckage it created in subaltern lives. Its critical representation of political histories impacting subaltern peoples and communities distinguishes fiction “after the wreck.” © The Author(s) 2020 S. Strehle, Contemporary Historical Fiction, Exceptionalism and Community, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55466-8_2
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S. STREHLE
To identify the qualities of this kind of historical fiction, it will be helpful first to acknowledge that it is literary fiction, coexisting with other kinds of historical fiction including historical romance. Impelled by the nature of romance, historical fictions in the capacious romance genre (including adventure, mystery, biography, fantasy, and science fiction, as well as the relationship fictions normally called romances) allow wreckage some scope in the plot’s middle, where it interrupts and delays the necessary resolution, but these narratives resolve historical chaos into recognizable stories of progress and continuity. This is not to deny the pleasures of historical romance; writers like Ken Follett, Diana Gabaldon, Kristin Hannah, Patrick O’Brian, and Jodi Picoult, among dozens of others, have well-deserved popular audiences. Sometimes closely researched, this fiction uses its historical setting as an antagonist blocking what romance promises: the return home, achieved union, restored safety, and joy. In Kristin Hannah’s bestseller, The Nightingale (2015), for example, Nazi brutality in occupied France during World War II provides challenging obstacles in a nar
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