Historical Fiction

Historical fiction is a subgenre of fiction that is set in a recognizable historical period and which presents a fictionalized account of key historical events or figures of that period. Early instances of the genre include some of the founding works of Western literature, such as Homer'sIliadandOdyssey, but it is in the nineteenth century, in the work of British and European authors, that historical fiction would be most prominently developed. Sir Walter Scott, for instance, appropriated the form and used it to promote a sense of Scottish national and cultural identity in the nineteenth century, as is visible in hisWaverleynovels (1814). In the twentieth century, however, important political events in the wake of both World Wars and the dismantling of the British Empire complicated the need to develop a common set of cultural images on which to establish a national identity; as a result, the place and function of historical fiction in British literature also became more complex. The returns to the past in literary works of the period partly had to do with a fascination with previous eras of uncontested British cultural and political superiority, but they also indicated a wish to understand the changed state of affairs in the present. These narratives tend to highlight parallels throughout history between tragic events of the past and those of the present by focusing on the role and responsibility of mankind in both. This is visible in such works as William Golding'sThe Spire(1964), which returns to fourteenth‐century England to narrate the construction of the spire of Salisbury Cathedral; the tale emphasizes the destructive nature of one man's single‐mindedness and the disregard for the cost of human lives involved in the building of the religious monument. Iris Murdoch'sThe Red and the Green(1965) is set in early twentieth‐century Ireland and recounts the events of the Easter Rebellion of 1916. Both texts return to well‐established events in British history to illuminate little‐known aspects of their development, or to adopt a lesser‐known perspective on those events. This is also the case of Barry Unsworth'sSacred Hunger(1992), which is set in the mid eighteenth century and revisits the slave trade from the perspective of a surgeon on board a slave ship.