The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed

The New Historical Fiction

Ina Bergmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000295702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Historische Romane

The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction explores the renaissance of the American historical novel at the turn of the twenty-first century. The study examines the revision of nineteenth-century historical events in cultural products against the background of recent theoretical trends in American studies. It combines insights of literary studies with scholarship on popular culture. The focus of representation is the long nineteenth century – a period from the early republic to World War I – as a key epoch of the nation-building project of the United States. The study explores the constructedness of historical tradition and the cultural resonance of historical events within the discourse on the contemporary novel and the theory formation surrounding it. At the center of the discussion are the unprecedented literary output and critical as well as popular success of historical fiction in the USA since 1995. An additional postcolonial and transatlantic perspective is provided by the incorporation of texts by British and Australian authors and especially by the inclusion of insights from neo-Victorian studies. The book provides a critical comment on current and topical developments in American literature, culture, and historiography.

1 History, Fiction, and the USA

1.1 The New American Historical Fiction

The turn of the twenty-first century not only marks the beginning of the new millennium but also signals what some historians mockingly call “a new golden age of historical popularization” (Wilentz). The “renaissance of the historical novel” (Byatt, Histories 9) is transnationally documented (Nünning, Fiktion II; Hutcheon, Canadian; Bölling; Meinig; Green; Friedrich). It is one segment of “a worldwide florescence of popular interest in the past” (Harlan 109), which also includes forms of visual and virtual history (Scheiding, “Introduction”; Groot, Consuming, Remaking; Hulbert/Inscoe). The comeback of historical fiction is embedded in the overall return of narration (“Wiederkehr des Erzählens,” Friedrich 7) and the general “renaissance of the book” (Ribbat 17). A popular revival of historical fiction (King 2) can be traced since the 1980s and 1990s (Kunow, “Making” 187). Especially the last twenty-five years have seen an unprecedented height in the genre, even surpassing its heyday in the nineteenth century (Harlan 109). At the turn of the twenty-first century, historical fiction “has finally come into its own” (…Johnson, Historical xvii).

This revitalization of historical fiction in the USA is a phenomenon informed by a number of dichotomies. The most striking of these is that the contemporary historical novel has managed to please both readers and critics, a trend that is obvious for twenty-first-century fiction in general (Ribbat 11). The popular book in the US today – to borrow the title of James D. Hart’s seminal study The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (1950) – is the historical novel. The literary market is flooded with historical fiction of all kinds, the publishing houses readily accommodating the demand. Relevant novels are recommended to a broad public by popular and very influential book clubs and TV shows. Bookstores increasingly feature separate sections for historical fiction (Friedrich 12). Historical fiction has always been a genre favored by the audience (Burt xi), but this level of success is new.

The acclaim the texts find not only with the reading public but with literary critics is probably the most significant aspect of the present-day success of the genre. Contemporary historical fiction bridges the gap between supposedly serious and popular literature, a demand raised as early as the 1970s by Leslie A. Fiedler with his catchphrase “cross the border – close the gap.” “[L]iterary historical novels” (…Johnson, Historical 465) top the best-seller lists while at the same time meeting the critics’ approval. Established writers try their hand for the first time or time and again in the genre (e.g., Susan Sontag, In America, 2000; E. L. Doctorow, The March, 2005; Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, 2006) (…Johnson, “What”), and new writers successfully start their career in it (e.g., Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain, 1997; Jeffrey Lent, In the Fall, 2000; John May, Poe & Fanny, 2004). For a long time, the historical novel bore the stigma of genre literature (Sauerberg 12). Historical fiction was often a field of critical controversy (…Johnston/Wiegandt 9; Burt xi; Engler/Müller; Kurt Müller 35; Johnson, Historical 2; Borgmeier/Reitz 8–11). Many of the contemporary books are enthusiastically reviewed in journals, newspapers, and magazines and satisfy the aesthetic requirements of a literarily trained, intellectual audience. The most blatant manifestation of the literariness of the new historical fiction is the success of the genre when it comes to prestigious prizes. If one applies the simplest, naturally contestable definition of the genre – “a novel in which the action takes place during a specific historic period well before the time of writing” (Baldick 114) – most of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award over the last twenty-five years can be identified as historical fiction (Harlan 109). But what is even more striking is that a majority of the novels are set in the nineteenth century.

Georges Letissier asserts that “[i]t is now a well-established fact that the Victorian age has become historically central to late postmodernism” (111). Along with the rise of the neo- (Shiller), retro- (Shuttleworth), or post-Victorian novel (Kucich/Sadoff xiii; Kirchknopf 64–66) in British and New English literatures (Moore 136; King 6), the nineteenth century has prominently come into focus in American historical fiction. In a modification of Eric Hobsbawm’s designation of the long nineteenth century in Great Britain (1789 to 1914), Jürgen Osterhammel’s global definition of the long nineteenth century in Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (2010) spans the period from 1770 to 1918/19 (102–03). This periodization, if applied to literature, yields the result that the dominating number of new historical novels work with a nineteenth-century sujet. I suggest here that the long nineteenth century in the United States roughly straddles the years between 1776 and 1914/17, from the Declaration of Independence until the beginning of or the American entry into World War I, with an important caesura – the American Civil War of 1861–65 – dividing the time period near the middle (Schlereth xii; Joyce 3). The early starting point of the period ties in with the attempts of Americans to create a cultural identity for their nation soon after the colonial era came to a close. In this endeavor, historical fiction played a vital role. The late terminus emulates the well-known efforts by noteworthy modernists “to pinpoint a moment of transition – Virginia Woolf’s 1910, D. H. Lawrence’s 1915, Ezra Pound’s 1922 – a historical caesura from which a new dispensation would begin” (Kunow, “Making” 178; see also Joyce 3).

Historical fiction has shifted its focus from “the movers and shakers of times past – great men and the countries they ran and conquered,” to “people and themes that [had] previously remained in the background … neglected topics, such as common people’s daily lives and how they were affected (or not) by major events” (…Johnson, Historical 4). In contemporary historical fiction, the “maps and chaps version” (Carol Shields qtd. in Hollenberg 341) of history has given way to an interest in social history. The innovations in the historical-novel genre are related to transformations within historiography (Robinson 3–53). Authors aim at a rewriting of history when choosing their topics (King 3). The new historical fiction takes a revisionist stance toward established historiography. Often this coincides with a return to the storytelling tradition, especially from the marginalized perspectives of women or racial and ethnic minorities (Rothaug 10; Heilmann/Llewellyn 5). The texts are influenced by postmodern discourses of feminism, multiculturalism, and postcolonialism (Elias, Sublime 219) and incorporate or reflect developments in literary and historical theory, for example, poststructuralism, radical constructivism, and especially new historicism (Fluck, “Activist”). The categorizations of contemporary fiction vary from what has been labeled neo-realistic (Versluys; Claviez/Moss; Bradbury, “Neorealist”), prepost- (Bradbury, “Writing” 18), and post-postmodern (Hassan, “Beyond”) literature. The forms the writers of new historical fiction use range from seemingly traditional historical novels to more inventive ones. The historical novel’s revisionism today is twofold: it revises and reinterprets the historical record, often exposing it as the traditional version of the past, and it transforms the conventions and norms of historical fiction (McHale 90).

I am adopting and adapting the term ‘new historical novel’ from Martha Tuck Rozett’s study Constructing a World: Shakespeare’s England and the New Historical Fiction (2003) for the American texts discussed in this study. I find this term to be fitting for various reasons. First of all, the historical fiction discussed in this study is literally ‘new,’ as contemporary novels, published over the last twenty-five years, are the subject of scrutiny. The adjective ‘new’ further points to the current literary period or movement in the US, which has, for its recourse to or reinvention of realism, been labeled “new realism” (Fluck, “Surface” 65). Furthermore, ‘new’ evokes an intentional reference to the “New American Studies” (Rowe), which adopt a transnational critical focus since the 1990s, questioning the paradigm of American exceptionalism and viewing the US as a multicultural nation in a globalized world – likewise an objective in the texts I discuss. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the phrase ‘new historical’ highlights the strong affinity of this literary trend to the theories of “new historicism” (Greenblatt, Power 5). The new historicists’ trajectories of the nonhierarchical juxtaposition of literary and nonliterary texts, their focus on questions of ideology and power in historiography, and their assumption that the past is only available in textualized form strongly inform the new American historical fiction.

This study attempts to chart and structure the field of the new American historical novel by raising a number of questions: Why does American fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century concern itself with the past? Which notions of history and historical awareness predominate in these novels? Is the fascination with historical fiction a form of millennial escapism? Or do historical novels communicate a historical lesson by providing us with knowledge of the past? Why is it especially the nineteenth century that fuels the imagination of writers and stimulates the fantasy of readers? Do the texts possess the power to revise contemporary perceptions of American history? Do they thereby influence the perception of the American present and future? What are the political, ethical, and emotional functions that historical novels fulfill? What are the formal and stylistic changes in historical fiction? And, perhaps most importantly, do all of the findings signify an utterly new trend in American fiction after postmodernism? These are some of the questions that drove the research for this study. I would like to state that the explanations and answers offered here cannot be completely exhaustive, especially since the field is still evolving as I am writing this. The study in hand merely hopes to bring some light to these issues and thereby tries to broaden the canonical scope of American historical fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century.

And before I proceed with my analysis of the new historical fiction, I would like to issue another caveat. It is impossible to analyze or even list all historical fiction that has been published in the United States throughout the last two or three decades. This study will therefore sacrifice any attempt at a survey or a cataloging of this vast material. In order to reduce the subject to manageable proportions, the following choices have been made to narrow down the corpus and focus of this work: the first, obvious choice was to limit the focus to the genre of the historical novel. This study will only concentrate on longer prose narratives, not on shorter texts like novellas or short stories. In the following, the term ‘historical fiction’ will be used synonymously with the term ‘historical novel.’ Of course, this does not mean that historical fiction in the short(er) form does not deserve further scholarly scrutiny (Engler/Scheiding). The corpus has then been reduced to contemporary historical fiction set in the nineteenth century. The preoccupation with the nineteenth century seems to be preeminent within the genre of the historical novel in the USA today. Thus, the analysis of this phenomenon may yield representative results, as it may be presumed that within this corpus the most diverse, or even all possible, subgenres of historical fiction may be covered. The next choice has been to restrict the discussion to works that are set in the United States and concern American issues. Whether or not the author of the work is American was of no concern for the selection. Indeed, the texts discussed in more detail in this study include the work of one Australian and one British writer. These choices differ greatly from the ones underlying the few existing studies of the contemporary American historical novel in temporal, formal, geographical, and subject range, as shown by, for example, the titles of studies by Timothy Parrish, Michael Butter, and Philipp Löffler, namely From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction (2008), The Epitome of Evil: Hitler in American Fiction, 1939–2002 (2009), and Pluralist Desires: Contemporary Historical Fiction and the End of the Cold War (2015).

This study aims at in-depth analyses of selected novels that are representative of larger themes as well as formal experiments within the genre. The degree of public recognition a text has already received was not a criterion for selection, although in some cases it coincided with the other requirements. The framework outlined by the questions listed earlier and approached in the following introductory section of this study – by touching upon relevant aspects of narratology, genre studies, memory studies, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, gender studies, transatlantic studies, and historiography, among other fields – will be applied to twelve novels which revisit and revise the nineteenth century in the United States. They are Valerie Martin’s The Great Divorce (1994), Caleb Carr’s The Alienist (1994), Christopher Bigsby’s Hester (1994), Lauren Belfer’s City of Light (1999), Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001), Diane Glancy’s Stone Heart (2003), Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club (2003), Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City (2003), John May’s Poe & Fanny (2004), Geraldine Brooks’s March (2005), Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days (2005), and David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife (2008). Although the number of novels selected may not be large enough to give a universally valid diagnosis of the field, it nevertheless should allow for the identification of representative trends. Generally, I am interested in the significance of this body of writing as a literary and cultural phenomenon. This study should be understood as a first positioning of this vast trend. Finally, as fiction is both a cultural document and a form of criticism (Kirchknopf 75), I would like to claim, adapting a phrase by Peter Middleton and Tim Woods, that this study is a provisional contribution to a cultural poetics of contemporary American literature (13).

1.2 A Brief History of the Historical Novel

The beginnings of historical fiction or the recounting of long-ago events goes back very far, to the era of the oral tradition in literature. Sarah L. Johnson, drawing on one of the earliest commentaries on historical fiction, Alessandro Manzoni’s essay “Del romanzo storico” (1850; published in English as “On the Historical Novel,” 1984), claims that “[h]istorical fiction is one of the oldest forms of storytelling” (Historical 2). Richard Lee declares that “in all cultures, historical fiction is the most natural form of story-telling.” This ties in with C. Vann Woodward’s verdict that “[i]n a sense, all novels are historical novels. They all seek to understand, to describe, to recapture the past, however remote, however recent” (142). If historical fiction is the oldest form of narrative, this also makes historical fiction the most enduring literary genre. Yet when all novels are seen as historical novels, the explanatory power and informative value of the genre label is diluted.

In a more critical approach, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814) is usually recognized as the first historical novel in English and regarded as the prototype of the whole genre. With his novels, Scott created an individual Scottish national identity for his country, distinct from the British, and thereby struck a strong chord with nationalists and patriots in the United States. Scott’s success was soon to be followed by calls for a similar invention for American literature. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the United States experienced its newly gained independence from Britain, the “two key features” of the United States were “its novelty and its fragility” (Parish 9). American intellectuals were striving to establish a distinctive cultural identity for the new nation and felt a strong need for cultural products to complete the work of the previous generation, who had first established Americanness through the political work of revolution. Walter Channing claimed in his “Essay on American Language and Literature” (1815) in the North American Review that the nation’s “colonial existence” was “opposed to literary originality” (307–08). A “[n]ational literature” needed to be rooted in the “native peculiarities of the country,” among them the “various objects of history” (312). At the time, the American nation was generally deemed “an imitative one” (49) by Washington Irving in his essay “English Writers on America” (1819/20). It seemed self-evident that Americans, following in Scott’s footsteps, needed to recover their own history in the New World and declare it the main field of “the exertion of their own intellectual powers” (Channing 314; see also Orians; Spiller; Fluck, Imaginäre 84–104; Glazener 40–43).

The genre of the historical novel soon found its way across the Atlantic, briskly promoted by American intellectuals, who campaigned for the development of a distinctly American national identity, culture, and literature. In the following decades, many American writers concentrated on the portrayal of America’s antecedents. Creating fictional images of the nation’s past became a part of the emancipation of American culture from British influence. The writers were drawing on the historical novels of Scott for the mold of the genre but creating something original by filling it with typically American ingredients, such as strongly religious Puritan settlers, Native Americans and their exotic cultures, and the c...