Fiction and History

Category: From the literary critics

  • A Springfield History of Race and Faith

    FOR IMMEDIATE NEWS RELEASE Contact: Missouri State University Office for Diversity and Inclusion Email: DiversityandInclusion@MissouriState.edu Telephone: 417-836-3736 A Springfield History of Race and Faith: A Reading and Panel Discussion Featuring Novelist Steve Yates With a Special Dance Performance by God’s Chosen Ministry (MSU’s Student Praise Ministry Group) 7:00-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 25 In the Historic…

  • Curiosity’s Cats: Writers on Research coming April 15, 2014 from Minnesota Historical Society Press

    Curiosity’s Cats: Writers on Research Edited by Bruce Joshua Miller   “Each morning I would strike out for this temple of learning in the crisp autumn air . . . with a sense of purpose and the conviction that this was where I belonged.”—Marilyn Stasio from Your Research—or Your Life             Inspired partly by Richard…

  • The Uses, Misuses, and Boundaries of History in Fiction about Missouri’s Civil War

    [March 22, 2013, I’ll be on a panel at the Missouri Conference on History in Cape Girardeau put on by the State Historical Society of Missouri. A double honor, in that all through graduate school and my stint at University of Arkansas Press I was a subscriber and devoted reader of the Missouri Historical Review,…

  • What I did say at Voices of Conflict: From Battlefields to Springfield and Beyond

    Voices of Conflict: The American Civil War from Steven B Yates on Vimeo. Brentwood Public Library, Monday, April 18: Steve Yates, Dr. William Garrett Piston, and Dr. Randall Fuller talk about the genesis of their books. This vimeo link at http://www.vimeo.com/22632952 will take you to the full lecture and Q&A from Monday night.

  • Lukács tells us what’s wrong

    The historical novel of our day, despite the great talent of its best exponents, still suffers in many respects from the remnants of the harmful and still not entirely vanquished legacy of bourgeois decadence.” I had rather hoped my first novel would be sopping with unvanquished, bourgeois decadence (see defintion of the Historical Romance novel).…

  • For an answer, let’s get a pinch of Heine

    Reading Georg Lukács The Historical Novel, I think I’m finding one source of the chafing between the writer of fiction set in the past and the historian. In his chapter on “The Classical Form of the Historical Novel” Lukács praises Sir Walter Scott as the original and in some ways the greatest historical novelist. From…

  • Let us now praise “mediocre” men

    In his illuminating chapter, “The Classical Form of the Historical Novel,” Georg Lukács outlines writing strategies that would set the historical novelist at odds with the historian. First Lukács argues that the historical novel makes a major departure from the age-old form, the national epic. In an epic, “Achilles is not only compositionally the central…

  • Lukács assigns the beginning of mass history

    It was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars, and the rise and fall of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass experience, and moreover on a European scale. During the decades between 1789 and 1814 each nation of Europe underwent more upheavals than they had previously experienced in centuries.” from The Historical…

  • Fredric Jameson justifies the historical novel

    The historical novel, however—and it was [Sir Walter] Scott’s originality to have grasped this in the very moment of emergence of the form—is populist and collective. The great yet enigmatic individual “subjects of history” must be approached by way of the average, anonymous consciousness of ordinary witnesses and merely representative “heroes” for whom the great…

  • Fredric Jameson describes the “decline of” the historical novel

    from his intro to Georg Lukács The Historical Novel With a new class-conscious defense of middle-class privilege, however, the historical novel also, as a form, loses its vitality and its vocation, and is degraded, as Lukács shows in a wealth of illustrations… , into a narrative that is at once archeologizing and modernizing, which now…