Reading Historical Fiction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Reading the Represented Past: History and Fiction from 1700 to the Present

   • Kate Mitchell, Nicola Parsons

   Pages 1-18

3. Learning to Read the Past in the Early Historical Novel

   • Anne H. Stevens

   Pages 19-32

4. Temporal Systems in Representations of the Past: Distance, Freedom and Irony in Historical Fiction

   • Hamish Dalley

   Pages 33-49

5. ‘All Histories Are Against You?’: Family History, Domestic History and the Feminine Past in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion

   • Mary Spongberg

   Pages 50-66

6. Rereading Hogarth and Pope: Authenticity and Academic Fictions of the Eighteenth Century

   • James Ward

   Pages 67-84

7. Panoramic Byron: Reading, History and Pre-cinematic Spectacle

   • Helen Groth

   Pages 85-100

8. ‘The Painted Record’ in George Eliot’s Historical Novel Romola

   • Kara Marler-Kennedy

   Pages 101-118

9. Reading and Remembering History in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year

   • Nicola Parsons

   Pages 119-135

10. The Gothic Reader: History, Fear and Trembling

    • Diana Wallace

    Pages 136-152

11. Notes Towards a Poethics of Spectrality: The Examples of Neo-Victorian Textuality

    • Julian Wolfreys

    Pages 153-171

12. Dickens and Ways of Seeing the French Revolution: A Tale of Two Cities

    • Jon Mee

    Pages 172-186

13. The Uses of History: The Historical Novel in the Post-French Revolution Debate and Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Marcus Flaminius (1792)

    • Fiona Price

    Pages 187-203

14. The Living Past and the Fellowship of Sacrificial Violence in William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball

    • Ingrid Hanson

    Pages 204-219

15. Back Matter

    Pages 220-243

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This collection examines the intersection of historical recollection, strategies of representation, and reading practices in historical fiction from the eighteenth century to today. In shifting focus to the agency of the reader and taking a long historical view, the collection brings a new perspective to the field of historical representation.

• Charles Dickens
• fiction
• novel
• British and Irish Literature

'This collection has range, variety and contemporary interest and will do much to re-frame debates about historical fiction. It brings together a range of approaches and texts and a group of distinguished critics to offer fresh insight and will make a mark.' - Linda Anderson, Professor of Modern English and American Literature, Newcastle University, UK

• Australian National University, Australia

  Kate Mitchell

• University of Sydney, Australia

  Nicola Parsons

HAMISH DALLEY Doctoral candidate, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, the Australian National University HELEN GROTH Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow, School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Australia INGRID HANSON University of Sheffield, UK KARA MARLER-KENNEDY Doctoral candidate, English Department, Rice University, USA JON MEE Professor of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literature and Print Culture, University of Warwick, UK FIONA PRICE Senior Lecturer in English, University of Chichester, UK MARY SPONBERG Associate Dean Research, Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University, Australia ANNE H. STEVENS Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Nevada, USA DIANA WALLACE Professor of English Literature, University of Glamorgan, UK JAMES WARD Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature, University of Ulster, UK JULIAN WOLFREYS Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, Department of English and Drama, Loughborough University, UK

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