Historical Novel

In the second edition of The Historical Novel, Jerome de Groot expertly charts the evolution of one of literature’s most beloved and complex forms. From its eighteenth-century origins to postmodern and contemporary historical fiction, de Groot reveals how historical fiction continues to challenge, provoke, and transform our understanding of the past. The second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded with global perspectives and new emphasis on the role and importance of female writers throughout. Readers will discover fresh insights on:

• different genres, such as sensational or ‘low’ fiction, crime novels, literary works, counterfactual writing and related issues of audience, value, and authenticity;
• the many functions of historical fiction, particularly the challenges it poses to accepted histories and postmodern questioning of ‘grand narratives’;
• the relationship of the historical novel to the wider cultural sphere with reference to historical theory, the internet, television, and film;
• key theoretical concepts such as the authentic fallacy, postcolonialism, Marxism, Neo-Victorian approaches, critical race theory, queer and feminist reading;
• works which diversify our understanding of the form and reflect an increasing sense that the writer should be understood as intervening in historical debates—including the work of Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Townsend Warner, W. G. Sebald, Chinua Achebe, Sarah Waters, Amitav Ghosh, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy.

Drawing on a wide range of examples from across the centuries and around the globe, the second edition of The Historical Novel is essential reading for exploring the rich intersection where history meets fiction—a creative borderland where the past continues to be reimagined.

Jerome de Groot is Professor of Literature and Culture at the University of Manchester, UK. He is the author of Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions (2015), Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, Second Edition (2016), and Double Helix History: Genetics and the Past (2023).