For several years now, while teaching courses in “creative nonfiction” and moderating seminars with titles like"Where Fact Meets Fiction," I have been wrestling with such questions [about the"line between likely imaginings and wholesale invention”]. And Potter and Owen are right in perceiving that I have a beef with the way history is conventionally written. I believe we can draw nearer the elusive truth – and also make history more vivid and accessible -- by combining scholarship with imagination, and by augmenting traditional “analytical narrative” with the techniques of fiction (scene, dialogue, point of view).Perhaps McGoogan is just using"the way history is conventionally written" in an excessively loose fashion, but I fail to see how his chosen solution is any less conventional. Herodotus, anyone? The invented speech? Like it or not, however, such tactics stopped signifying as"history" centuries ago--as the anti-Jacobin polemicist, novelist, and pedagogical theorist Elizabeth Hamilton discovered when she tried to resuscitate them for The Memoirs of the Life of Agrippina, Wife of Germanicus (1804). It's not that the relationship between history and fiction should necessarily be like that of a sphere, projecting against a plane; after all, aren't many historians and biographers good at scene-setting, narrative tension, and so forth? But he's right that most would not recognize the following as"history":
For example, I cite a passage in which Williams reveals that two bitter enemies confronted each other aboard a discovery ship. Because the records and log books have not survived, he moves on without elaborating, as mandated by the pseudo-scientific conventions of analytical narrative:“Here, where even the dullest novelist would leap to reconstruct the confrontation scene, Williams refuses to speculate, to go beyond the dubious evidence of primary documents. He declines to dramatize his best guess, well-informed though it certainly is. One can’t help wondering what would happen if superlative historians like Glyn Williams stopped pretending that they practice science and accepted that they write literature. Maybe history would begin to regain its audience?”
Subversive, you see? Reviewing Ancient Mariner, Owen asks: Where do we draw the lines? The writer of historical fiction, I believe, has taken out a license to change dates, names and venues, and to invent, combine or kill off characters, whatever; the writer of historical nonfiction, on the other hand, must work within the known facts, changing and ignoring none of them. I take the position that, having assimilated the relevant journals, letters, biographies and histories, the non-fiction writer can then use imagination and craft to bridge gaps in the record.
This seems to me to be a distinction without a difference. Indeed, Gore Vidal normally describes his own novelistic practices very much as McGoogan is here describing nonfiction. There are all sorts of other things wrong in these paragraphs--for starters, popular history (especially military history & Civil War) has a huge audience, and, to my knowledge, most historians aren't under the impression that they're the reincarnation of Ranke (surely being beholden to one's evidence isn't the same thing as doing"pseudo-science"?!)--but I'll let the historians handle it.
UPDATE: The morning after,"distinction without a difference" seems unnecessarily abrupt. To elaborate, McGoogan exaggerates the"license" allowed to historical novelists, who can change only so much before their work becomes either risible or alternate history. (Anyone who has ever snickered through a bad historical film knows of what I speak.) Hence the"ever since Scott" tendency to push major historical figures off to the margins. At the same time, as I said, McGoogan's definition of historical nonfiction actually sounds remarkably close to how many historical novelists would define their own practice. I've mentioned Gore Vidal; my father has also on occasion pointed out that Mary Renault's Funeral Games (the power struggles in the wake of Alexander the Great's death) is very much tied to the historical evidence, even to the extent of speculating why some of the evidence has vanished.
Ralph weighs in on invented speeches in the comments. He sounds against 'em.
There are a number of academic bloggers who do an excellent job of talking about their scholarship, but that again is not in and of itself"scholarly activity": it's like writing an abstract for a book or conference paper. And, as Matt Weiner points out in Unfogged's comments, there's nobody to stop you from blogging something inane or just plain wrong (although there are plenty of people out there who will, after the fact, gladly point out that you've done so).
That said, there are a number of bloggers out there who could probably claim credit for their blogs as service credit (e.g., running a blog dedicated to the activities of a professional society) or teaching credit (e.g., developing a group blog for classroom use). But blogging's appeal--the ability to post"to the moment," to write informally and without the intervention of an editor, to interact immediately with an audience, and so forth--seems, if anything, to militate against the kind of ongoing work (and, quite frankly, real drudgery) involved in scholarship. You can get instant gratification from a blog post, but not from that article on Emily Sarah Holt you've been writing for the past two years. [X-posted and slightly edited.]
Some other observations:
The biggest growth industries: African-American and Latin American historical fiction.
The most noticeable absence: nothing on gay and lesbian historical fiction. (Norman Jones of OSU, who wrote his dissertation on the subject, volunteered some helpful information on the field, or lack thereof.)
New" canonical" historical novelists, from a variety of subfields: Peter Ackroyd, Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, Octavia Butler, A. S. Byatt, E. L. Doctorow, Carlos Fuentes, George Garrett, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Charles Johnson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Elsa Morante, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Graham Swift, D. M. Thomas, Barry Unsworth, Sherley Anne Williams.
Oh yes, they did write historical novels, didn't they?: George Eliot, William Faulkner, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
That sounded strange the first time I read it: Simon Edwards, speaking of Cooper, claims that
It [Cooper's use of violence] may also be investigated as part of a more general"pornography of representation" that continues both to shock and excite us, one corollary of which is the icy disdain with which some feminism, rooted as it is in a Puritan recoil from images of the human body, regards all narrative and pictorial art. [note deleted] Certainly the devaluation of the historical novel seems related at least to the successes of feminist criticism in revising the achievements of male and female novelists in the early nineteenth century.*
Edwards' footnote points us to (oh, dear) Andrea Dworkin, Suzanne Kappelar, and Catherine MacKinnon. I'm having a hard time squaring Edwards' position with feminism's positive fascination with the historical novel form. On nineteenth-century historical fiction, for example, there's Christina Crosby, Ina Ferris (who wrote one of the most influential books on Scott in recent years), Robert P. Irvine, Rohan Maitzen, Susan Morgan, and Shirley Samuels. (Oh, and I have something to say about this stuff as well...) That's just a partial list of books; if you start calculating articles and chapters--not to mention books on twentieth-century historical fiction--then the list would spiral off into infinity. Aren't these critics more relevant to the discussion than Dworkin and Co.?
How far has this conversation gone?: At times, it felt as though some critics were simply repeating nineteenth-century debates (e.g., is the historical novel a mode of historical writing, or not?). I also noted some tacit agreement that when it came to realist historical fiction--that is, in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott--the original"rules" seem to work the best.
*Simon Edwards,"The Geography of Violence: Historical Fiction and the National Question," Novel 34.2 (2001). 9 November 2004. Academic Search Premier.
[X-posted, with some changes, from The Little Professor.]
[X-posted from The Little Professor.]
When you occupy a tiny niche in the scholarly world, at times it seems as though you're either a) talking to yourself or b) trying to establish a new vocabulary. Let's just say that 19th-century didactic historical fiction stands as the very model of a modern minor academic niche. (Which, incidentally, explains why the article I'm currently [not] working on has nothing to do with that subject.) These novels have interesting things to tell us about how the genre emerged and developed, about how many Victorians imagined their relationship to the past, even about how certain literary techniques functioned in popular--as opposed to "high culture"--contexts. Still, as a general rule, at conferences I'm usually one of the scant few who has read any of the books under discussion, let alone heard of the authors.
From a literary-historical point of view, one of the interesting things about these novels is that the reason for their existence often has little in common with our current theories of the historical novel's "purpose." For that matter, the kind of literary criticism that appeared in the major Victorian periodicals rarely speaks to these books, either. A number of novelists, for example, clearly saw themselves as popular national and/or ecclesiastical historians. Deborah Alcock primarily specialized in novels about the Continental Reformation and Calvinism; Elizabeth Rundle Charles took on various offshoots of Western Christianity, mostly channeled through the history of a single family; the Rev. A. D. Crake mainly wrote medieval "chronicles"; Emily Sarah Holt did the entire history of Britain from a hardline Protestant perspective; Emma Leslie postholed major periods in ecclesiastical history, especially the Reformation; and Emma Marshall focused on key moments in Anglican history.
Now, there are a number of twentieth-century historical novelists who saw (or see) themselves doing similar work--e.g., Peter Ackroyd, Mary Renault, Kenneth Roberts, Gore Vidal. Critics who discuss their work, however, generally examine it in terms of milieu and, for lack of a better term, "liveliness." Did the author avoid anachronism? Successfully reconstruct past worldviews? Creatively synthesize fictional and factual elements? Imagine private life and thinking in a way unavailable to the historian? By contrast, the didactic historical novel emphasized the moral and theological value of the plot. History, to put none to fine a point on it, was a sometimes dangerous mess*; novels, though, obeyed different laws of narrative construction (probability, closure, linear development, etc.**), and those laws nicely approximated the workings of divine providence. (I discussed popular providential history last March.) In other words, literary narrative was potentially more "truthful" than historical narrative because it could clarify how God's plan worked--not necessarily because literature could put a livelier spin on real events. Readers could see God's plot in a novel, but not in a historical text, given that the latter would be full of all sorts of confusing, not to mention possibly immoral, sidelights and distractions. For a modern reader, there's a downside to this approach--namely, that the novelist sometimes appears to be writing the same book forty times. (Emily Sarah Holt, I'm looking at you.) For the didactic historical novelist, however, any innovation lost was clarity gained. Notice, for example, how Deborah Alcock announces the plot of one of her novels:
But before the little city [Geneva] could accept and fulfil her mission, she had to be trained and educated, and purged from the elements irreconcilable with it. These were twofold. The worst foes of true order and of true liberty (which in their essence are but one), are a false order, which is slavery, and a false freedom, which is license. In throwing off the yoke of Rome, Geneva had emancipated herself from the first; she had still before her a long and bitter struggle with the second, represented by that party known in history as the Libertines.***
When Geneva enters the historical stage, it does so with a specific goal ("mission"), and everything that happens thereafter advances the city towards that goal ("trained," "educated," "purged"). For Alcock, history has a purpose, and her novel illuminates just how purposeful it is. Moreover, historical events are less important than the moral concepts that they represent--a position that some novelists and popular historians used to excuse all sorts of historiographical felonies.
*--Especially when children were involved. One writer on pedagogical subjects, W. Newnham, warned that there were some works of history and natural philosophy "so interlarded with error, so intermixed with irreligion, that the young mind, ere it can be aware of danger, may have drank deeply of a poison, which will pervade the principles, and influence the conduct, and alienate the affections, from the simplicity of piety…” The Principles of Physical, Intellectual, Moral, and Religious Education, 2 vols. (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1827), 2:576.
**--I'm ventriloquizing here.
***--Deborah Alcock, Under Calvin's Spell (London: Religious Tract Society, n.d.), 27-28.
[X-posted from The Little Professor.]Databases and bibliographies. The most copious online database is the Project Historische Roman, which allows you to search over 6700 German novels by author, title, and/or year. Unfortunately, if you're studying nineteenth-century British historical fiction, the best you can do online is Jonathan Nield's Best Historical Novels and Tales, archived at Project Gutenberg and various other sites. (The best guide to nineteenth-century historical fiction proper: Ernest Baker's Guide to Historical Fiction.) That being said, one can learn quite a bit by poking around in such essential resources as British Fiction 1800-29 (which includes reviews and publication histories), Corvey Women Writers on the Web (which covers work published between 1796 and 1834), and the Literary Encyclopedia. While it doesn't have a search function, British Juvenile Story Papers and Pocket Libraries Index includes many authors of children's historical tales in its listings. If you desperately need to find a nineteenth-century historical novel about Rome, head to Fictional Rome. Soon Y. Choi has a good, albeit sporadically annotated, master list of historical novelists. For e-texts, try Project Gutenberg, A Celebration of Women Writers, and Blackmask.
Individual authors:
- Grace Aguilar (Anglo-Jewish novelist & one of the first Jewish popular theologians)
- Deborah Alcock (staunchly evangelical Protestant novelist, still popular in some fundamentalist circles; site reprints Elizabeth Boyd Bayly's 1914 biography)
- Lydia Maria Child (American abolitionist and activist)
- James Fenimore Cooper
- Alexandre Dumas (bilingual)
- Erckmann-Chatrian (in French)
- George Eliot
- G. A. Henty (article in the Guardian)
- Victor Hugo
- Charles Lever (Irish novelist)
- Captain Frederick Marryat (nautical fiction)
- Karl May (German novelist heavily influenced by Cooper)
- John Mason Neale (Anglo-Catholic fiction)
- Charles Reade
- Walter Scott Digital Archive (superbly done)
- Catherine Maria Sedgwick (Unitarian novelist)
- Joseph Henry Shorthouse (another Anglo-Catholic)
- Stanley John Weyman (swashbucklers)
- Charlotte Mary Yonge (prolific High Church Anglican)
[X-posted from The Little Professor, with a minor tweak.]
English professors may not see the immediate relevance of Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (2001), an empirical study of "historical cognition" (xi)--that is, how teachers (mostly high school teachers), students, and parents think about the past. Wineburg sensibly dismantles extreme claims that historical thinking is all about facts or all about interpretation, pointing out that while we cannot think about history without facts, we also cannot think about history if we confine ourselves to lists of dates. He takes particular interest in what he calls "contextualized thinking" (90), in which readers "think about the past on its own terms" (90) by constructing narratives out of the sometimes sketchy primary evidence available (91). Wineburg hardly thinks that he's offering some revelatory insight here; the meat of the book lies in the case studies, which track both the pedagogical difficulties involved in thinking contextually (an "unnatural act," Wineburg argues), and the disciplinary frameworks that affect how teachers themselves understand such thinking. Moreover, he goes on to analyze how students bring their own frameworks into the classroom--inherited from popular culture, religious influences, other teachers, etc.--and how that potentially affects the learning process.
These interpretive frameworks can make themselves felt at odd moments in even the most formalist of literary classrooms. For example, I occasionally teach a course called Women in the Novel. It's not a "women writers" course, strictly speaking, but I generally teach it as such; this time around, we had all three Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and, in theory, Mary Elizabeth Braddon. (Not in practice, as it turned out.) Like most Victorianists, I rapidly discovered that many students have "learned"--from TV? osmosis? random reading?--that Victorian women spent their entire lives in the house (literally, some of my students seem to believe), doing nothing but taking care of their children, cooking, and warming their husband's slippers. Those students then interpret the novels through the prism of this pop culture "interpretation" of what Victorian women were expected to do, with decidedly quirky results. Moreover, this pop culture framework sometimes sticks around long after you explain the far more complicated realities of a Victorian woman's everyday existence (which, of course, varied drastically according to decade, social class, religious affiliation, etc., etc., etc.). I say this not to make fun of my students, but to point out a basic pedagogical difficulty: the historical narrative you provide in the classroom may not be the one that the students bring to the literary text, even when historicist interpretations are not even remotely at issue. This problem becomes especially acute when the class is reading realist fiction, because it's so easy to read literary realism as a window onto social arrangements.
But when we introduce "history" into our courses, how do we go about it? At a conference several years ago, a historian observed that historians like their literature to stay stable, whereas literary critics like their history to stay stable. In other words, it's very easy to slip into the habit of presenting historical background stripped of its own disciplinary signposts--especially when we don't actually know the debates surrounding our history of choice. Obviously, this danger becomes exacerbated when we're out of our element. (Hey! Let's have the specialist in twentieth-century American literature teach British Literature I!) But even when we do know the ins and outs of, say, the current scholarship on Victorian labor movements, I suspect that many of us--myself included--present the history as somehow denuded of disagreement, while emphasizing the complexity of the assigned literary works.
As it happens, Wineburg discusses how a teacher's presuppositions about student abilities affects how s/he introduces historical thinking into the classroom. Do we avoid metadisciplinary reflections in the undergraduate classroom because we think that the students can't handle it, or because we think that we don't have time? Similarly, do we try to separate formal and historical questions because we're nervous about the effects of badly digested factoids on papers, because we haven't figured out how to integrate the two, or because we've got other priorities? When I teach Victorian fiction, I point out that such novels aren't long because nineteenth-century readers just liked really, really big books--they're long because, until the end of the century, the financial incentives of the Victorian book trade both encouraged and demanded triple-deckers. (As I like to quip, some Victorian novelists and publishers made the appropriate page length by resorting to techniques familiar to students: triple spacing, massive fonts, playing with the margins... Trollope grumbles about such things in the Autobiography.) But I don't integrate this information as much as I would like; it's more of a stopgap, I think, designed to explain something without necessarily opening up new interpretive possibilities. I take this route partly because I really want the students to learn how to pay close attention to the way poems or novels work as poems or novels--and because naive historicist readings reduce me to sobs of agony. And yet, surely such naive readings are as much a product of the way I introduce historical information as they are of the students' own abilities? And yet again, if I only have the students for three hours per week, what can I reasonably expect them to accomplish?
(For an example of a site that opens up ways to talk about English disciplinary history, see Laura Mandell's Romantic Anthologies page.)
(X-posted to The Little Professor.)Terry Teachout calls our attention to this astonishing example of a biographical subject's heirs taking their objections to new heights. According to the author, Deirdre Bair:
This is a chilling moment in the annals of Jungian scholarship. The heirs of C.G. Jung, led by their spokesperson Ulrich Hoerni, have raised objections concerning the alleged invasion of their privacy that, due to German law, has forced Knaus Verlag [the publishers of the German edition of Jung: A Biography] to include their opinions of Jung's life and work within the pages of my book. These will appear as annotations to my extensive notes that follow the text. This unprecedented invasion of my book by the Jung heirs is an appalling act and is happening against my will.
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