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Where does the fiction writer fit in?
Prisoners at the Gratiot Street Military Prison the 2 day of February 1863 from Corporal Willis Knight sent forward from Don’t know where on the ditto date of Feb 1863, by order of Don’t know who, as no papers came with guard of prisoners. There being no descriptive list sent with these prisoners it is…
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Michael Fellman’s concept of survival lying
Loyalty was not the safest and most common presentation of self during this guerilla war; prevarication was. Frankness and directness led to destruction more often than did reticence and withdrawal. Not letting on, telling the questioner—from either side—as little as possible but enough to placate him, became the safest avenue of escape. I would call…
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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…
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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…
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Memory, History, Forgetting, Editing
…[B]uried under the footprints of memory and history then opens the empire of forgetting, an empire divided against itself, torn between the threat of definitive [erasure] of traces and the assurance that the resources of [recollection] are placed in reserve.” from Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting This sentence, impacted between semicolons, started so majestically, and…
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Humor in history
This can’t have been funny when Colonel Puchkov wrote it in 1760. And Elizabeth Roberts in her book Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro may not have thought it funny. But she’s pretty worldly and nuanced in this Cornell UP book. So, maybe she smiled. It’s Puchkov’s quote, delivered before a grim…
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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…
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Jared Farmer’s remarks on extra-local history
One historian who may not dismiss novelists and fiction is Jared Farmer. In accepting the 2009 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians he said some interesting things about the craft and the historians’ guild. Farmer’s book, On Zion’s Mount, garnered him the award. Farmer says this in his speech: A history book…
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Fiction and history
This is an exploration not an answer. Throughout the writing of my novel (1993-2009), Morkan’s Quarry, I had the privilege of assisting a lot of historians of the south and of the Ozarks. When, through their own sleuthing or their own kindness, they discovered I was writing a novel set in the past, these historians…
Fiction and History 