Description
Modernism and Historical Fiction: Writing the Past is the first comprehensive study of modernist historical fiction. Analysing texts from all four nations of the British Isles and arguing for a new spatially-aware theoretical approach, it outlines a concept of modernist historical fiction which bridges the gap between Walter Scott s novels and late-twentieth-century postmodern historiographic metafiction.
Beginning with an exploration of Virginia Woolf s engagement with Scott s novels, it argues that this informed her own writing of historical fiction, including Orlando and Flush. It then uses five case studies examining representations of key historical periods (the classical world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) to analyse how other modernist writers used a variety of narrative and linguistic strategies to expose the plurality of the past.
The rich and diverse body of historical fictions examined includes work by Ford Madox Ford, H.D., Laura Riding, Mary Butts, Helen Waddell, John Cowper Powys, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Edith Sitwell, Naomi Mitchison, Lynette Roberts, Gwyn Thomas and Joseph Conrad. These fictions foreground the act of writing the past in order to revise, displace or supplement traditional narratives and offer new ways of thinking about the processes of historiography.
Introduction: Modernist historical fiction: An impossible genre?.- Part I.- 1.'Reading Scott': Virginia Woolf and Sir Walter Scott.- Part II.- 2. Classical Worlds: Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome.- 3. 'Jazzing' the Middle Ages: imagining the Medieval.- 4. The strangeness of the Renaissance: Tudors and Elizabethans.- 5. The elegant Eighteenth Century: reason and rebellion.- 6. The long Nineteenth Century: Victorians and others.- Coda: Wide Sargasso Sea as modernist historical fiction.Diana Wallace is Professor of English Literature at the University of South Wales, UK, where her teaching and research focus on women s writing, historical fiction, Modernism and the Gothic. Her publications include Christopher Meredith (2018), Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic (2013), The Woman s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000 (2005) and Sisters and Rivals in British Women s Fiction, 1914-39 (2000). She has edited Hilda Vaughan s Here are Lovers (1926) and Harvest Home (1936) for Honno s Welsh Women s Classics series.
