21st Century US Historical Fiction

Contemporary Responses to the Past

Ruth Maxey

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030418977
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Moderne Literaturkritik

This new collection examines important US historical fiction published since 2000. Exploring historical novels by established American writers such as Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, E.L. Doctorow, Chang-rae Lee, James McBride, Susan Choi, and George Saunders, the book also includes chapters on first-time novelists. Individual essays in 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past tackle prominent and provocative new novels, for example, recent Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction by Anthony Doerr, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Colson Whitehead. Interrogating such key themes as war, race, sexuality, trauma and childhood; notions of genre and periodization; and recent theorizations of historical fiction, scholars from the United States, Canada, Britain and Ireland analyze an emerging canon of contemporary historical fiction by an ethno-racially diverse range of major American writers.

© The Author(s) 2020

R. Maxey (ed.)21st Century US Historical Fictionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41897-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. US Historical Fiction Since 2000

Ruth Maxey¹

(1)

Department of American and Canadian Studies, School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Ruth Maxey

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Historical novels in English belong to their own long tradition but in recent years the genre has enjoyed a surge of critical acclaim and commercial popularity, reflecting “our current hunger for historical fiction” (Park 2018, 112). As Christine Harrison and Angeliki Spiropoulou (2015) contend, “while the ‘history turn’ in the humanities has assumed an astounding variety of forms, the new prominence of history in contemporary literature is without doubt one of its most significant and intriguing manifestations” (1). Hilary Mantel, the British author of two Man Booker prize-winning historical novels—Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012)—devoted her 2017 Reith Lectures to discussion of the genre, contending: “facts and alternative facts, truth and verisimilitude, knowledge and information, art and lies: what could be more timely or topical than to discuss where the boundaries lie?” (quoted in Quinn 2017). Mantel’s allusion to the Trump administration’s championing of false claims as so-called alternative facts can be linked to the subject of 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past—namely, the suspicion and skepticism toward “truth” of many American historical novels published since 2000. As a genre, the historical novel invariably raises questions of evidence, authenticity, veracity, and authority (Stocker 2012, 309–10), issues that overlap with the narrativizing, sense-making work of the professional historian (compare Slotkin 2005, 223; White 2005). These questions are of particular interest at the present political and technological moment: if “historical novels are always political in their implications” (Slotkin 2005, 231), then we also live in a digital age where different forms of information—and “truth”—are so abundantly available that they should be appraised even more closely.

21st Century US Historical Fiction speaks directly to these issues, fulfilling the particular need for scholarly research into what Elodie Rousselot has termed “neo-historical fiction.” Discussing contemporary British writing, she argues that the neo-historical novel “consciously re-interprets, rediscovers and revises key aspects of the period it returns to …these works are not set solely in the past, but conduct an active interrogation of that past” (2014, 2). Rousselot also discerns “clear continuities” between this subgenre and “the historiographic metafiction which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s …[through] similar postmodern preoccupations with questioning prevalent cultural ideologies” (1–2). Historiographic metafiction , as defined by Linda Hutcheon (1989), comprises

novels whose metafictional self-reflexivity (and intertextuality) renders their implicit claims to historical veracity somewhat problematic …Historiographic metafiction works to situate itself within historical discourse without surrendering its autonomy as fiction. And it is a kind of seriously ironic parody that effects both aims: the intertexts of history and fiction take on parallel (though not equal) status in the parodic reworking of the textual past of both the “world” and literature. (3–4)

The “neo-historical” turn that Rousselot identifies can be distinguished from this well-known model in that the contemporary fiction she examines is less “overtly disruptive …[and] carries out its potential for radical possibilities in more implicit ways” (2014, 5). For Rousselot, such neo-historical novels—with their inherent paradoxes and contradictions—occupy an ambiguous position vis-à-vis nostalgia, voyeurism, commodification, and consumption, offering a privileged First World reader a kind of “escapist fantasy” from the anxieties of a globalized present-day world through “a perception of the past as inferior …simultaneously an object of allure and repulsion, fascination and rejection …[an] otherness as …‘spectacle,’ to be observed and enjoyed at a distance, and without accountability” (7–8).

Many of these “neo-historical” characteristics can be applied to twenty-first-century American historical fiction. After all, contemporary US writers employ an authorial mode that is questioning and skeptical, anti-positivist and distrustful of so-called master narratives of history. Their work is also formally playful and often strongly intertextual. At the same time, it seems reductive to confer too specific a designation upon the rich panoply of recent US historical fiction, whether that be “historiographic metafiction” or the “neo-historical novel.” As Paul Wake (2016) notes, “while much recent critical commentary has been dedicated to the genre in its postmodern iteration, the historical novel demonstrates a range of characteristics and is itself subject to numerous subdivisions” (82). It is a branch of fiction known for its “formal hybridity …[where] little consensus exists about the principal forms [it] …has taken even within the same cultural and/or geographical context” (Harrison and Spiropoulou 2015, 2–3).

Beyond this agreed formal hybridity, what, then, is distinctive about US historical fiction produced since 2000? As for earlier American writers working in this genre, the fictive subject matter is most often drawn from American history (compare Savvas 2011, 1) and reflects what Lois Parkinson Zamora (1997) terms an “anxiety of origins.” According to Zamora, this phenomenon

impels American writers to search for precursors (in the name of community) rather than escape from them (in the name of individuation); to connect to traditions and histories (in the name of a usable past) rather than dissociate from them (in the name of originality) …its textual symptoms are not caution or constraint …but rather narrative complexity and linguistic exuberance …Their search for origins may be ironic and at the same time “authentic,” simultaneously self-doubting and subversive. (1997, 5–6; emphasis in original)

Pace Zamora, the continuing bid to create a usable past comes from an anxiety that is richly generative. In many contemporary US historical novels, that past is a twentieth-century one, as writers grapple with modernity and rapid technological change. Within this twentieth-century timescale, they are more likely to turn to the 1960s than the 1940s—the latter decade being more characteristic of British historical fiction—and they interrogate issues of race, war, and trauma in particularly American, but also more transnational ways: US fictions of elsewhere, such as novelists’ imaginative responses to global conflicts in Europe, Korea, and Vietnam. And as Mark West argues about the 1960s novel in Chapter 12 of this collection, “post-postmodern writers” in the United States approach recent history in more intimate and less ironic ways as they confront a past that also, in some sense, represents their own personal memory and lived experience. In other words, their fiction uncovers a distinction between “the past …[which] is ontological …and history [which] is epistemological” (Savvas 2011, 2). That history is of course mediated through the lens and lessons of today’s world. Indeed, the novelistic emphasis upon warfare (see Chapters 8, 9, 10, and 13 of this volume) reflects what Joseph Darda (2015) calls “the narrative logic of permanent war” (82)—that is, decades of uninterrupted US warfare overseas.

The fraught, complex, racially diverse roots of the contemporary United States also require further excavation as writers fruitfully return to the nineteenth-century nation: to the antebellum and postbellum periods and to the cities of an industrializing North, especially New York (see Chapter 4). In so doing, many of the American novelists considered in this collection complicate traditionally dominant conceptions of national identity by foregrounding minority voices and the vulnerable figure of the child. Thus they counter the erasure of marginalized peoples by exposing and recuperating hidden histories through fiction. This also leads to new forms of memorialization. US writers in the twenty-first century continue to question enduring mythologies since “at the core of culture is a continuous dialogue between myth and history, ‘plain invention’ and the ‘core of historical fact’” (Slotkin 2005, 229). Hence a number of the writers examined here critique white privilege, especially white male privilege. Some also question “compulsory heterosexuality” in Adrienne Rich’s phrase (1980; see Chapter 11). American historical fiction continues to be compellingly relevant because “writers …problematize issues by identifying the historicity of behaviors, motives, and beliefs …suggesting that presentist approaches are part of the suppression of underlying reality” (Byerman 2005, 9). Contemporary US historical novels are also exciting thanks to their formal experimentation, as many of the chapters in this collection reveal, and these literary techniques are, of course, inextricably connected to the ways in which particular themes are unsettled and contested. Polyphonic narration and a range of other narrative devices are engaged here to suggest the restoration of lost voices, while some writers also play with chronology, upsetting readerly expectations of any putatively straightforward—linear, sequential, teleological—temporal framework. The energetic use of intertextuality enriches these works further and—recalling some of the characteristics of historiographical metafiction (Hutcheon 1989)—results in subversive counternarratives that write back to US political and cultural hegemony at home and abroad (see Chapter 10).

A number of scholars have recently produced monographs or edited collections on contemporary works of historical fiction in English, reflecting the significance of the genre and its ever-growing appeal to different audiences. It is notable that these academic studies are primarily concerned with British novels.¹ By contrast, some important scholarly works consider recent US historical fiction but they examine different writers and texts from the present study.² In other words, there remains a clear gap in the currently available scholarly literature on recent historical novels from the United States and it is this gap that 21st Century...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. US Historical Fiction Since 2000
• Part I. Imagining 19th-century America in Recent Historical Fiction
• Part II. Representations of the 20th-Century United States
• Back Matter