The Contextual Referent in Contemporary British and Irish Historical Fiction

Since Walter Scott’s early nineteenth-century novels recreating the past of his Scottish homeland or his nostalgic and mythical view of the Middle Ages, historical narratives have enjoyed significant popularity and prestige in English-language literature. In recent decades, critics have even observed a “historical turn” in contemporary British and Irish fiction, reflecting a burgeoning interest in history among many canonical and mainstream novelists. With this in mind, our research project seeks to provide a revised contextual approach to the current British and Irish historical and neo-historical novel. Our objective is to conduct an analysis of the contexts, forms, functions, aims, themes and features that prevail in the diverse and hybridised nature of these texts.

Aims

1. To examine the contextual referential frame of the recent British and Irish historical novels in the light of their own approaches to history.
2. To assess the historical and cultural value of these texts.
3. To explore how these historical novels problematise conventional notions of history and time.
4. To examine the historical roles of women as the unheard and silenced voices of the community.
5. To trace similar features, concerns, and outcomes between British and Irish historical novels.
6. To analyse the complex and varied nature of the historical novel from the perspective of literary genre, proposing a classification of the literary sub-genres used and examining how different subgenres contribute to the representation of the past.

Methodology

To achieve our objectives, we will employ various methodological approaches:

• To address the contextual and documentary veracity of the historical novels included in this project, we will adopt the contextual approach suggested by Derek Attridge in the special issue of the journal New Literary History 42.4 (2011).

  Additionally, Kate McLoughlin’s Authoring War (2011) will serve as an indispensable resource for research on war representation.

• Elodie Rousselot’s conception of “neo-historical” fiction will be utilised, as neo-historical novels question the approaches on which the traditional notion of linear and sequential history is based.
• We will critically engage with texts from an ethical framework to raise awareness of misrepresentation, invisibility or the unveiling of silences in historical narratives. Works such as Narrative Ethics (1995) by Andrew Z. Newton, and Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility (1999) by Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods, among others, will inform this aspect of our research.
• Our exploration of the roles of women as the unheard voices of the community and their restoration into history will be framed within a cultural memory approach, drawing on recent feminist memory studies.
• Finally, we will consider other methodological approaches related to the study of literary genres, such as euchronias.