Historical Fiction Now - Hardcover

by Mark Eaton (Author), Bruce Holsinger (Author)

Historical Fiction Now brings together prominent authors, scholars, and critics of historical fiction to explore the genre's character, fortunes, and potential in the twenty-first century.

Gathering together the voices of novelists, critics, academics, and several authors writing across these categories, the volume explores the nature of reading, writing, and writing about historical fiction in the present moment while meditating on some of the myriad contexts of the genre.

What inspires writers to choose particular moments, events, and personalities as the subjects of their fictional imaginings, and with what implications for their readers' understanding of the present? How do contemporary scholars approach the making and reception of historical fiction, and how do these approaches resonate with writers' own preoccupations in the process of invention? What might scholars of a genre with a long and complex history learn from its contemporary practitioners? Conversely, how do novelists understand their own historical fictions (if at all) in relation to the theoretical and critical traditions shaping the work of their academic colleagues?

The collection features an original essay by Hilary Mantel on the making of the Wolf Hall trilogy as well as contributions from internationally known novelists such as George Saunders, Namwali Serpell, Maaza Mengiste, and T饌 Obreht, among others.

Author Biography

Mark Eaton, Professor of English, Azusa Pacific University and Associate Research Professor of American Literature, Claremont Graduate University, Bruce Holsinger, Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English, University of Virginia

Mark Eaton is a Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University and an Associate Research Professor of American Literature at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Religion and American Literature Since 1950 (2020).

Bruce Holsinger is the Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (2001), The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (2005), Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (2007), and The Parchment Inheritance: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (2022). He is also the author of two historical novels: A Burnable Book (2014) and The Invention of Fire (2015). His most recent novels are The Gifted School (2019) and The Displacements (2022).