Fiction and History

Category: Fiction and history

  • Cross purposes and the conflict between fiction and history

    As I work through the reading list for this project, I think it’s time to pause for some working definitions of purpose, and maybe we’ll get at what the technical writers call “the problem of the report.” Here’s a first stab at it. It is the sworn duty of the professional historian to apprehend and…

  • Working definition: Emotional truth

    Emotional Truth A visceral, heartfelt connection that arises between reader and character or characters through the unfolding (and possibly the resolution) of an invented, narrated conflict, a connection so powerful that the reader perceives reality and truth in what is known to be pretend, known to be fiction. This truth arises through a combination of…

  • Working definitions: Divisions among historical novels

    1) The Classic Historical Novel (Defined largely by Georg Lukács in The Historical Novel) A novel in which a character of middling importance caught between warring factions in a conflict serves as reader’s ambassador to a setting and time well in the past of the publication date. Large historical figures, kings, clan war lords, mighty…

  • What the couch next to the writer’s desk ought to look like

    Partial bibliography The Battle of Carthage: Border War in Southwest Missouri, July 5, 1861 Borderland Rebellion: A History of the Civil War on the Missouri-Arkansas Border Civil War St. Louis The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens A Concise History of Bulgaria Conversations with E. L. Doctorow Crossroads at the Spring: A Pictorial History of Springfield,…

  • A fiction that keeps making history: ebooks do cost money

    Dear Editors at Financial Times: I am pleased to see the attention David Gelles and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson focus on the unsettled but exciting waters publishers now navigate (“A Page is Turned….” February 9). While much of the article informed readers greatly about the challenges and opportunities publishers face, I am disappointed that no one from…

  • History is in the heart of the beholder and the mouth of the ranger

    Travel for University of Arkansas Press in the late 1990s took me to an unforgettable Missouri town, Arrow Rock, and the whole environ along the banks of the Missouri River. As a sidetrip to a day of events at the Missouri Folklore Society meeting, I drove over to the National Military Park at the battlefield…

  • Unwinding the story, or Give him enough rope

    For those forced to read history, passages that describe everyday life or economic output in a period must be like slogging through genealogical lists of begats in the Bible. But for the motivated fiction writer… well, these passages provide a geeky thrill. An example, in Missouri’s Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern…

  • Satan’s dangerous fiction, or Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be bogomils

    A Concise History of Bulgaria, Second Edition by R. J. Crampton (Cambridge University Press) yields us some thoughts on fiction from an intriguing and, as Crampton labels them, heretical group of Christians called the bogomils. All this below is a riff on material from his chapter on Mediaeval Bulgaria. When I quote, it’s from Crampton…

  • History in the hands of the populists, or Zinn v. Horowitz settled out of court

    I don’t think the late Howard Zinn would approve of Vicksburg’s Old Court House Museum in A People’s History of the United States. Too much power, too many portraits, too many weapons and flags, all the oppressed and small movers of history overwhelmed or on the sidelines. And yet, we should not have to suffer…

  • Did they ever let him go? Or do we just make it up?

    On 31 August [1865] only one Confederate prisoner remained at Gratiot Street [Prison] (there is no record of his release). So ends Louis S. Gerteis’s engaging chapter “A Friend of the Enemy” in Civil War St. Louis. In a dearth of good record keeping at an overwhelmed prison, this understated conclusion is the topper. If…