Contextual drift

I love serendipitous encounters with books that look irrelevant to your work, but on closer examination spark off new lines of thought. As I've mentioned now and again here, I'm writing a long bibliographical essay for Choice covering the last 10-15 years of scholarship on historical fiction. My shelves are now crammed with books on Latin American historical fiction, postmodern historical fiction, African-American Italian historical fiction, German historical fiction, Spanish historical fiction, Civil War fiction, Holocaust fiction, steampunk, historical mysteries...the list is endless.

Last week, I picked up Ashraf H. A. Rushdy's Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form, which is one of several recent books on this subgenre. Now, no-one in their right or even wrong mind would confuse my critical approach with Rushdy's, but I was struck by how he managed historical context. For Rushdy, the neo-slave narratives of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s engage with at least three different historical moments at once: the author's immediate historical context; the author's memory of the 1960s; and the lost world of (usually) antebellum America. The present affects how the novelist represents the past, but that present is also filtered through the author's memory of the 1960s; moreover, as is so often the case in any historical fiction, the novelist represents the past so as to make it shape or anticipate the "now." There are quite a few balls to be kept in play here.

Right now, I'm in the middle of writing, rewriting or publishing several articles on Victorian didactic historical fiction. These novels are far less complex than anything discussed by Rushdy; they try to micromanage reader response, they disallow ambiguity, and they usually promote oversimplified attitudes to both past and present. Nevertheless, Rushdy's point strikes a chord when it comes to historical novels, especially evangelical historical novels, written in the second half of the nineteenth century. For late-Victorian evangelicals like Emma Leslie or Deborah Alcock, the English equivalent of the 1960s is 1829--the year of the Catholic Emancipation Act. While the early 1850s are also important, it's 1829 that haunts their memories and their narratives. In a sense, later Victorian novelists take 1829 as proof that modern English culture has "lost" its history, especially that history bound up with the Reformation and Protestantism more generally; the most programmatic novelists are out to reverse the effects of that loss. At the same time, their work also speaks to the religious politics of the later Victorian period, which they represent as a time of dangerously unbounded religious toleration. In rewriting the past so as to make 1829 look aberrant instead of logical or necessary, the novelists try to invent a new--and far more Protestant--present for themselves and their readers.