Modernism and Historical Fiction

Modernism and Historical Fiction: Writing the Past is the first comprehensive study of modernist historical fiction. Analysing texts from all four nations of the British Isles and arguing for a new spatially-aware theoretical approach, it outlines a concept of modernist historical fiction which bridges the gap between Walter Scott’s novels and late-twentieth-century postmodern historiographic metafiction. Beginning with an exploration of Virginia Woolf’s engagement with Scott’s novels, it argues that this informed her own writing of historical fiction, including Orlando and Flush. It then uses five case studies examining representations of key historical periods (the classical world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) to analyse how other modernist writers used a variety of narrative and linguistic strategies to expose the plurality of the past. The rich and diverse body of historical fictions examined includes work by Ford Madox Ford, H.D., Laura Riding, Mary Butts, Helen Waddell, John Cowper Powys, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Edith Sitwell, Naomi Mitchison, Lynette Roberts, Gwyn Thomas and Joseph Conrad.  These fictions foreground the act of writing the past in order to revise, displace or supplement traditional narratives and offer new ways of thinking about the processes of historiography.