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Historicity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2023
Abstract
Historicity—that is, a cultural and aesthetic engagement with historical movement—is a crucial term for analyzing and evaluating what we commonly call “realist” fiction. In The Historical Novel (1939), Georg Lukács famously associated literature's historicity with the realist novel's ability to capture historical movement through typical characters, a feature he tied to Walter Scott's historical romances. For Lukács, Scott's “faithfulness” to history does not imply “a chronicle-like, naturalistic reproduction of language, mode of thought, and feeling of the past.” Rather, it comes from the way Scott uses “necessary anachronism” to portray the past “as the necessary prehistory of the present,” primarily through his protagonists’ symbolic movement between warring camps. Although historical romances remained popular in British literature after Scott's death, Victorian historical romances differed from the Waverley novels in important ways. This brief keyword essay considers the nature of those differences and their effect on literature's historicity more generally.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
Notes
1. Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, translated Hannah, and Mitchell, Stanley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 61 (emphasis original)Google Scholar.
2. Scott, Walter, Waverley, edited by Garside, P. D. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 363Google Scholar.
3. See O'Dell, Benjamin D., “Lyric Moments and the Historicity of the Verse Novel: Amours de Voyage,” Victorian Poetry 59, no. 4 (2021): 411–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Victorian Counter-Pastoral: Adam Bede as Historical Novel,” Studies in the Novel 54, no. 1 (2022): 26–44.
4. Bakhtin, Mikhail M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Holquist, Michael, translated by Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84Google Scholar.
5. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 84–85.
6. On the historicity of literary modernism, see Esty, Jed, “Global Lukács,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42, no. 3 (2009): 366–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), particularly 105–24, Linda Hutcheon analyzes the postmodern tendency to question the verifiability of historical events. Lukács examines early twentieth-century historical novels in a realist vein (Historical Novel, 251–350), and in Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), Theodore Martin describes “the improbable resilience of historicist imagination” in literature since the 1980s, wherein contemporary novelists use various genres and concepts to historicize the present (197).