History & Historical Fiction

A historical novel is a novel in which the story is set among historical events, or more generally, in which the time of the action predates the lifetime of the author. As such, the historical novel is distinguished from the alternate-history genre. more...

Home
Arts & Photography
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Ages 4-8
Ages 9-12
Animals
Arts & Music
Authors & Illustrators, A-Z
Baby-3
Books on Cassette
Books on CD
Computers
Educational
History & Historical Fiction
Africa
Ancient
Asia
Australia & Oceania
Biographical
Canada
Central & South America
Europe
Exploration & Discovery
Fiction
General
Holocaust
Medieval
Mexico
Middle East
Military & Wars
Modern
Prehistoric
Renaissance
United States
Issues
Literature
Obsessions
People & Places
Popular Characters
Reference & Nonfiction
Religions
Science, Nature & How It...
Series
Sports & Activities
Comics & Graphic Novels
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment

The historical novel was popularized in the 19th century by artists classified as Romantics. Many regard Sir Walter Scott as the first to have used this technique, in his novels of Scottish history such as Waverley (1814) and Rob Roy (1818). His Ivanhoe (1820) gains credit for renewing interest in the Middle Ages. Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) furnishes another early example of the historical novel.

Historical fiction may center on historical or on fictional characters, but usually represents an honest attempt based on considerable research (or at least serious reading) to tell a story set in the historical past as understood by the author's contemporaries. Those historical settings may not stand up to the enhanced knowledge of later historians.

Many early historical novels played an important role in the rise of European popular interest in the history of the Middle Ages. Hugo's Hunchback often receives credit for fueling the movement to save Gothic architecture in France, leading to the establishment of the Monuments historiques, the French governmental authority for historic preservation.

Historical fiction has also served to encourage movements of romantic nationalism. The Polish winner of the 1905 Nobel Prize in literature, Henryk Sienkiewicz, wrote several novels set in conflicts between the Poles and predatory Teutonic Knights, rebellious Cossacks and invading Swedes. (He also penned a once wildly popular novel about Nero's Rome and the early Christians, Quo Vadis, since filmed several times.)

Scott's Waverley novels ignited interest in Scottish history and still illuminate it. Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter fulfilled a similar function for Norwegian history and won a Nobel Prize for Literature (1928). * Luó Guànzhōng's 14th-century Romance of the Three Kingdoms covers one of the most important periods of Chinese history.

The genre of the historical novel has also permitted some authors, such as the Polish novelist Bolesław Prus in his sole historical novel, Pharaoh, to distance themselves from their own time and place in order to gain perspective on society and on the human condition, or to escape the depredations of the censor.

In some historical novels the main historic events take place mostly off-stage, while the characters inhabit the world in which those events are occurring. Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped recounts mostly private adventures set against the backdrop of the Jacobite troubles in Scotland. Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge is set amid the Gordon Riots, and A Tale of Two Cities in the French Revolution.

Other authors give historic characters a fictional setting, as in Alexandre Dumas' Queen Margot and Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon.

Read more at Wikipedia.org