The development of the novel of ideas has at times been closely related to the development of another literary form that emerged out of the social and political transformations of nineteenth-century Britain: the historical novel. With a glance back at a prototype of both forms – the fiction of Sir Walter Scott – this chapter moves on to discuss the work of one of Scott’s unlikeliest yet most significant inheritors, the Scottish socialist and feminist novelist Naomi Mitchison. It argues for Mitchison as one of the foremost twentieth-century practitioners of the historical novel as novel of ideas, focussing on The Bull Calves (1947), which she wrote during the Second World War, and which drew on her own family history as well as the wider history of Scotland’s complicated political status in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising. Mitchison’s most important contribution to the twentieth-century novel of ideas, the chapter concludes, was to forge a new kind of historical fiction which took seriously the dialectical relationship between conceptual and linguistic change.

This afterword considers the contribution made by the collection as a whole. It provides a frame for thinking of the 1830s as an ongoing phenomenon, looking at its influence in historical fiction set in the 1830s from George Eliot to Amitav Ghosh and the ways in which literary critics have attempted to understand the varied activity of the decade.

In the novel The Old and the Young, as well in many of his short stories, Pirandello, like Nietzsche, aims at undermining humankind’s faith in history. Life and world events are ruled by chance, according to Pirandello; since history is a fictional creation dependent on the ideology and feelings of the historian, writing it makes no sense. This is why one character in the short story “Interviews with Characters” tells the writer to concentrate instead on what really counts, the joy and suffering of even one real individual with whom readers can identify. This approach can be seen in the stories written with World War I as their backdrop: In one, for instance, Pirandello’s own anguish about his sons going off to fight is mirrored in the story of Marco Leccio, who must witness his sons’ departure for a conflict he thinks should be fought by the fathers as the completion of Italian unification because it was for his generation, not his sons’, that Austrians were enemies. Perhaps this skepticism about history’s ability to teach us anything was what made Pirandello deaf to the dangers of Fascism.

This essay looks at works by the Booker Prize-winning authors Peter Carey and Richard Flanagan, with reference to other internationally acclaimed Australian writers including Kate Grenville and Alexis Wright, to consider the ambiguous position of Australian literature in the evolving discourse of the Global South. Despite its emphatically southern location, Australia is usually classified as part of the Global North, based on various economic measures, and with the shift away from postcolonialism to a decolonial understanding of invasion as ‘a structure, not an event’ in settler societies, critics increasingly question whether writers of Australia’s white settler majority are ‘writing back’ to a dominant culture or writing from within one. Yet numerous critics have found it difficult to dissociate the land ‘down under’ from underdog status, and some identify Carey and Flanagan as writers of the Global South. They are aided in this by the historical settings of these authors’ best-known novels, which foreground past hardships endured by groups whose present-day descendants are typically much better placed. Ultimately, rather than seeking to place the Australian novel in relation to the Global South, this essay finds ‘the Global South’ and ‘the Australian novel’ to be mutually destabilising terms.

Expatriate women writers Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead produced field-defining novels of transnational scale and aesthetic ambition that engaged both the matter of Australia and the locations from which they produced and circulated their writing. For Richardson, the provocations of the ‘modern breakthrough’ in Scandinavian literature were central to her work with the realist novel. Stead’s girlhood saturation in gothic fairy-tales, the French novel and the Australian tradition expanded into restless experiments with the novel in the avant-garde circles of Paris (1929–34), before her negotiation of literary debates in France, England and America. The narrative strand of Kunstlerroman in Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–29) and Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children (1940) introduces the developing provincial subject as crucial to the vision of familial and national development, principally in the relation between child and parents. Stead and Richardson produced groundbreaking versions of the Kunstlerroman narrative, disrupting a stable nineteenth-century structure centred on stories about young artistic men. These women writers produced narratives of talented colonial subjects – young colonial children and provincial teenage daughters – situated outside these structures of power, and foregrounded their disruptive perceptions of flawed patriarchal-imperial modes of authority.

The chapter continues the emphasis on color and considers its relationship to temporal settings. As James F. English has shown, popular and prestigious fiction have diverged over the last half century, with the latter effecting a historical turn. Section 3.1 establishes a similar development for graphic novels, yet in contrast to contemporary novels, this historical turn remains limited to the subgenres of the graphic memoir and graphic journalism. Section 3.2 turns to Giorgio Agamben’s conception of the contemporary as a historicizing account of the present and looks at graphic novels that span past, present, and future settings. Where a focus on historical settings highlights a shift towards graphic nonfiction, the discussion of combined temporal settings argues for the continued vitality of popular subgenres within the graphic novel. Section 3.3 examines the evolving relationship between color printing and temporal settings.

This chapter describes the building, interior design, and furnishings in the location where the murders took place, drawing from a nineteenth-century historical novel about the crime.

Who wrote and circulated the first detailed account of the investigation? Depending entirely on this mysterious text, from the 1830s to the 1890s, Mexico’s most influential writers, thinkers, and political commentators retold the story of the deaths of Dongo and his servants, Emparan’s investigations, and the rapid resolution of the crime. These nineteenth-century retellings appeared in various kinds of publications, from periodicals to multi-volume novels. Each of these versions had its own interpretative angle, but all of the nineteenth-century authors contextualized the massacre as an important symbol of the legacy of the Spanish empire. The case also provided Mexican intellectuals with a starting point for discussions about morality and free will, the continuing influence of the Catholic Church, and, above all, the effective Novohispanic judiciary in sharp contrast to the shortcomings of law enforcement in their new nation. This text provided fuel for political critique and its insider legal perspective strengthened the points of anyone who deployed it to argue their own views about the independent nation of nineteenth-century Mexico.

By 10.00 p.m. on October 23, 1789, the three killers’ machetes had finished their brutal work. Even before the sun had risen the next morning, information about the Dongo massacre had begun to spread quickly throughout Mexico City. On street corners, in taverns, and over breakfast in private residences, no one could resist talking about this shocking event. We cannot accurately recreate the path of the oral gossip after two centuries. However, a paper trail started to memorialize the events soon after Aldama, Quintero, and Blanco put down their weapons. Mexico’s most important nineteenth-century writers and intellects began to publish accounts of the murders and the investigation in the 1830s. These printed texts eventually led to a small boom in fictional reinterpretations of the crime and its aftermath in the 1860s. For the new nation, the murder and its rapid resolution symbolized the extremes of Spanish rule. Mexicans pondered how to deal with a continuing perception of excessive criminality in their society, an issue that independence from Spain had not resolved.

“Revolution and Nostalgia: Walter Scott, and the Forms of Jacobite Nostalgia,” examines the concept of revolution in relation to the events of 1688–89 by way of thinking about why this paradigmatic event of modernity – the first “modern” revolution on some accounts – only very hesitantly embraces the idea of revolution. It examines the figure of the Jacobite in Walter Scott’s Waverley, in order to argue that historical fiction works by a logic of nostalgia, structuring the past as the place of the fantasies of the present. This chapter explains why revolution becomes the central if disavowed political fantasy of secular modernity; why nostalgia, a word invented in 1688 and reaching its apotheosis and its formal incarnation as historical fiction over a hundred years later, haunts the project of secularity; and why the Jacobite is at once the exemplary revolutionary, the prototypical nostalgic, and the object of nostalgic investment. This chapter also explains why representations of the “revolution” of 1688–89 tend to allegorize it in terms of racial or colonial conflict and thus how the invention of the Highland rebel managed England’s ambivalence about its own experience with revolution and its colonization projects.

The precarity of the 1930s undergirded major transitions in Arna Bontemps’s waged and writerly labor. The flusher years of the 1920s saw him winning prizes, teaching school, and writing poetry, but the 1930s saw him take a decidedly historical turn, penning historical novels Black Thunder (1936) and Drums at Dusk (1939) and training to be a curator. This tracks alongside broader shifts in African American literature during the decade, both formally, as a bridge to social realism, and politically, through engagement with Marxism. By excavating Bontemps’s archive, this chapter confirms that he was an innovator who repurposed the historical novel to critique racial capitalism. At the same time, he sought to create saleable products and enhance his career. This paradox illuminates how African American literature of the 1930s was generated from the tension between leftist solidarity and the persistent notion of the talented tenth. Ultimately, Bontemps’s work emerges from the nexus of two radical projects: historical preservation and self-preservation, which together enabled the transition from New Negro aesthetics to the protest literature of the 1940s.

Knowing when to stop: define your parameters. ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ – take no small detail of everyday life for granted. Start broad and shallow; later go deep and narrow. The big story and the little story – keeping the balance right. Keeping research unobtrusive. Historical fiction: checklist of areas for initial research and suggested sources.

‘We’re not looking for historical truth but for fictive plausibility, on terms the writer must establish with the reader. A better question than ""Is this true?"" is “Have I made this seem plausible?”’

This chapter shows how the countershelf can offer a “contrary” theory of global modernity hinged around the totemic date of 1492 – simultaneously the fall of Muslim Spain and the violent opening of the “New World.” Approaching the quincentenary of these twinned traumas, novelists of the 1980s and 1990s linked them conceptually through a renovation of what had been a common theme in South Asian writing for more than a century: the Andalusian allegory. Gestures that “displace” waves of trauma in the subcontinent onto medieval Spain can be traced through Urdu writers including Hali, Abdul l’Halim Sharar, and especially Mohammad Iqbal. At the end of the twentieth century, Salman Rushdie, Intizar Husain, Tariq Ali, and Zulfikar Ghose creatively recapitulate these same affiliative projects, as did authors from the Americas, Octavio Paz and V. S. Naipaul. And yet, it was this same anxiety about comparable histories of colonization, in the very same moment of the 1990s, through which Latin America was pushed beyond the boundaries of the “postcolonial world.” The layered historical fictions of this chapter suggest a need to reevaluate postcolonial historiography on its own grounds.

Chapter 5 explores the visual and rhetorical styles through which Ottoman history was modernized. Faced with enduring Western Orientalism, Turkish authors, architects, and illustrators took a number of distinct stylistic steps to celebrate their history while presenting their relationship to it as an unequivocally modern one. The explosion of popular history magazines and historical novels during the 1950s provided a forum in which the act of reading about the past could itself become a performance of modernity. Whether blending popular history with pulp fiction or encouraging Turkish citizens to approach their country from the perspective of Western tourists, Turkish authors pioneered approaches to re-appropriating their own past that remain popular today.

This chapter explores the variety of genres within which Atwood has chosen to write about history, interweaving historical fact with imaginative rewriting and reinventing, with reference to her poems in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, her nonfiction essay “In Search of Alias Grace,” and her novels. The focus is on Atwood’s narrative art, with detailed analyses of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin. These novels with their splicing together of different genres (historical documentary, fictive autobiography, crime fiction, dystopias, Gothic) illustrate the multiple scripts and alternative perspectives through which history may be told, in Atwood’s reappraisal of Canada’s national history and heritage myths, as she reinterprets Canadian themes through her contemporary social, ethical, and global concerns.

This chapter re-examines the idea that the development of the novel was hampered by politics during the French Revolution and that literary production was mediocre and ill-suited to the new social order. It studies the shift in the literary scene after the storming of the Bastille and the role of writers in regenerating the nation before considering the propagandistic works of republican writers during the radical phase of the Revolution. The death of the radical leader Robespierre in 1794 resulted in a clear shift in literary activity and prompted a move towards setting novels during the early 1790s which denounce the excesses of Robespierre and his supporters. The chapter places particular emphasis on the under-researched Directory period (1795-99) which is marked by a vogue for the Gothic and for fiction by and about émigrés.

This essay examines the anonymous serialization of George Numa Des Sources’s novella Adolphus, A Tale (1853) in The Trinidadian, a radical Brown newspaper published in Port of Spain. The plot – a romance about a Brown Trinidadian exiled in Venezuela – mirrors Des Sources’s own emigration scheme for founding a utopian socialist colony in eastern Venezuela. Written after emancipation but set during slavery, Adolphus evinces what I call 'nonhistorical' fiction, foregrounding how the experiences of enslavement disrupt not only the temporal linearity of History (what Édouard Glissant calls 'nonhistory'), but also the ideological continuities that Georg Lukács argues define the post-1848 historical novel. By narrating an alternative past (one in which the protagonist and Simón Bolívar form a transnational alliance and collaborate to advance the mission of multiracial democracy), Des Sources forges the nonhistorical foundation for the future that his emigrant colony hoped to realize.