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7 books match the query 'Historical fiction'

cover of Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics

Ethics in the Gutter

Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics

Kate Polak

The Ohio State University Press, 2017

Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics explores an often-overlooked genre of graphic narratives: those that fictionalize historical realities. While autographics, particularly those that place the memoirist in the context of larger cultural conversations, have been the objects of sustained study, fictional graphic narratives that—as Linda Hutcheon has put it—both “enshrine and question” history are also an important area of study. By bringing narratology and psychological theory to bear on a range of graphic narratives, Kate Polak seeks to question how the form utilizes point of view and the gutter as ethical tools that shape the reader’s empathetic reactions to the content. 

This book’s most important questions surround how we receive and interpret representations of history, considering the ways in which what we think we know about historical atrocities can be at odds with the convoluted circumstances surrounding violence. Beginning with a new look at Watchmen, and including examinations of such popular series as Scalped and Hellblazer as well as Bayou and Deogratias, the book questions how graphic narratives create an alternative route by which to understand large-scale violence. Ethics in the Gutter explores how graphic narrative representations of violence can teach readers about the possibilities and limitations of empathy and ethics.
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cover of Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory: A Novel

Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory

A Novel

By Emma Pérez

University of Texas Press, 2009

Runner-up, Best Historical Fiction in English, Latino Book Awards Competition, 2010

This literary adventure takes place in nineteenth-century Texas and follows the story of a Tejana lesbian cowgirl after the fall of the Alamo. Micaela Campos, the central character, witnesses the violence against Mexicans, African Americans, and indigenous peoples after the infamous battles of the Alamo and of San Jacinto, both in 1836. Resisting an easy opposition between good versus evil and brown versus white characters, the novel also features Micaela's Mexican-Anglo cousin who assists and hinders her progress. Micaela's travels give us a new portrayal of the American West, populated by people of mixed races who are vexed by the collision of cultures and politics. Ultimately, Micaela's journey and her romance with a black/American Indian woman teach her that there are no easy solutions to the injustices that birthed the Texas Republic.

This novel is an intervention in queer history and fiction with its love story between two women of color in mid-nineteenth-century Texas. Pérez also shows how a colonial past still haunts our nation's imagination. The battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto offered freedom and liberty to Texans, but what is often erased from the story is that common people who were Mexican, Indian, and Black did not necessarily benefit from the influx of so many Anglo immigrants to Texas. The social themes and identity issues that Pérez explores—political climate, debates over immigration, and historical revision of the American West—are current today.

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cover of Georgette Heyer, History, and Historical Fiction

Georgette Heyer, History, and Historical Fiction

Edited by Samantha J. Rayner and Kim Wilkins

University College London, 2021

A collection of essays on the career of historical novelist Georgette Heyer.

The historical works of Georgette Heyer inspire a fiercely loyal, international readership, including literary figures such as A. S. Byatt and Stephen Fry. This book brings together an eclectic range of scholars to explore the contexts of Heyer’s career. Drawing upon scholarship on Heyer and her contemporaries, the volume illustrates the ways in which her work sits in a chain of influence and why it remains pertinent to current conversations on books and publishing in the twenty-first century. From the gothic to data science, there is something for everyone in this volume, which celebrates Heyer’s esteemed status amongst historical novelists. 
 
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cover of The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction

The Character of Truth

Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction

Naomi Jacobs

Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

Can the novel survive in an age when tales of historical figures and contemporary personalities dominate the reading lists of the book-buying public?

Naomi Jacobs addresses this question in a study of writers such as William Styron, E. L. Doctorow, and Robert Coover, who challenge the dominance of nonfiction by populating their fictions with real people, living and dead. Jacobs explores the genesis, varieties, and implications of this trend in a prose as lively as that of the writers she critiques.

Using as a case study Robert Coover’s portrait of Richard Nixon in The Public Burning, Jacobs addresses the important legal and ethical questions raised by this trend and applies contemporary libel law to the fictionalization of living people, such as Richard Nixon. She closes her study by speculating on the future of this device and of the novel.

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cover of The Raj Quartet, Volume 3: The Towers of Silence

The Raj Quartet, Volume 3

The Towers of Silence

Paul Scott

University of Chicago Press, 1998

The powerful third volume of Paul Scott's classic account of the final days of British rule in India

India, 1943: In a regimental hill station, the ladies of Pankot struggle to preserve the genteel façade of British society amid the debris of a vanishing empire and World War II. A retired missionary, Barbara Batchelor, bears witness to the connections between many human dramas; the love between Daphne Manner and Hari Kumar; the desperate grief an old teacher feels for an India she cannot rescue; and the cruelty of Captain Ronald Merrick, Susan Layton's future husband.
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cover of The Readers' Advisory Guide to Historical Fiction

The Readers' Advisory Guide to Historical Fiction

Jennifer S. Baker

American Library Association, 2014

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cover of The Real, the True, and the Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation

The Real, the True, and the Told

Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation

Eric L. Berlatsky

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

The Real, The True, and The Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation, by Eric L. Berlatsky, intervenes in contemporary debates over the problems of historical reference in a postmodern age. It does so through an examination of postmodern literary practices and their engagement with the theorization of history. The book looks at the major figures of constructivist historiography and at postmodern fiction (and memoir) that explicitly presents and/or theorizes “history.” It does so in order to suggest that reading such fiction can intervene substantially in debates over historical reference and the parallel discussion of redefining contemporary ethics.
 
Much theorization in the wake of Hayden White suggests that history is little better than fiction in its professed goal of representing the “truth” of the past, particularly because of its reliance on the narrative form.While postmodern fiction is often read as reflecting and/or repeating such theories, this book argues that, in fact, such fiction proposes alternative models of accurate historical reference, based on models of nonnarrativity. Through a combination of high theory andnarrative theory, the book illustrates how the texts examined insist upon the possibility of accessing the real by rejecting narrative as their primary mode of articulation. Among the authors examined closely in The Real, The True, and The Told are Virginia Woolf, Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman, and Milan Kundera.
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