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Neo-historical Fiction

Introduction: The (Neo-)historical in Contemporary English Literature and Visual Arts

Le néo-historique dans la littérature et les arts visuels britanniques contemporains
Armelle Parey

Résumés

Ce numéro d’Études britanniques contemporaines est issu du colloque annuel de la SEAC organisé par l’ERIBIA à l’Université de Caen Normandie les 17 et 18 octobre 2024. Le colloque se proposait de se pencher sur une tendance majeure du roman contemporain de langue anglaise, à savoir la prédominance du l’histoire et du passé, notamment quand celle-ci est accompagnée d’une forme d’auto-réflexivité qui caractérise le « néo-historique » (Rousselot). Ce numéro d’Études Britanniques Contemporaines réunit huit articles et un entretien avec la romancière Lucy Caldwell sur quelques aspects et modalités de la présence du passé historique dans la littérature britannique et les arts visuels contemporains.

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1This issue of Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines deals with various aspects of historical fiction today, a genre as dominant as it is multifaceted in contemporary English literature. In his overview of the historical novel 1980-2018, Jerome de Groot states: ‘It could be argued that the British historical novel is the most important, influential and enduring literary genre of the last thirty-five years’ (de Groot 2019, 169)—seemingly forever attracting more writers as is the case with Zadie Smith and her latest The Fraud (2023), despite her initial misgivings about writing in this genre (see Smith 2023). Similarly, in his tellingly entitled Retroland, Peter Kemp points to ‘an obsession with the past’ (3) in fiction in English since the 1970s which is ‘haunted by the consciousness of what has gone before. Looking back is the favourite authorial stance’ (Kemp 3) and historical fiction is one of the forms this takes. The genre also enjoys large visibility in popular culture: as pointed out by Leigh Wilson, historical fiction now ‘wins literary prizes, is the primary choice of book clubs, dominates bestseller lists and is snapped up for film and TV adaptations’ (Wilson 145). The Walter Scott Prize was thus created in 2009 and dedicated to historical fiction, delimited in time by the subtitle to Scott’s Waverley, ‘Tis sixty years since’. The list of Booker prizewinners since the 1990s also clearly reflects a prevailing interest in the past visible for instance in novels as diverse as A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (2005), Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009), Elinor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013), Anna Burns’ Milkman (2018) and Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (2020). Commercially successful, contemporary historical fiction, whether it considers historical events or focuses on social history, is also regularly adapted for the screen where it features along with no less popular period drama. Examples include BBC adaptations of Sarah Waters’s neo-Victorian novels, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2015) and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life (2022).

  • 1 See Hilary Mantel’s reaction when asked what advice she would give to historical novelists: ‘My fir (...)
  • 2 See, amongst others, Keen (2006), Boccardi (2009), De Groot (2010), Lowenthal (2015), Eaton and Hol (...)

2The historical novel has however undergone many changes and variations since its early instances in the 18th and 19th centuries and now takes on a bewildering variety of guises that this special issue cannot possibly hope to cover.1 Robert Eaglestone thus points out ‘the ever more diverse and contradictory array of modes by which the past is represented, forms which far exceed the historical novel as usually conceived’ (Eaglestone 2019, 312). This renewal of interest in the past and in ways of telling it is not only obvious in the significant number of scholarly studies published in the 2000s2 but also in the advent of neo-Victorian fiction, whose early proponents may be considered to be Jean Rhys and John Fowles, but which has developed more extensively since the 1990s, notably with A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990). For Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, what is remarkable in this trend is, at least at first, its self-conscious reconstruction of memory expressed in the ‘neo-’ prefix:texts (literary, filmic, audio/visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 4; original emphasis). It is this very ‘self-analytic drive’, this interrogation of the past that Elodie Rousselot offered to discuss in novels portraying other eras, coining the composite word ‘neo-historical’ for what she sees as a ‘sub-genre of contemporary historical fiction . . . characterised by its similar creative and critical engagement with the cultural mores of the period it revisits’ (Rousselot 2).

3If the early neo-Victorian works were historiographic metafictions, some of its later instances, like neo-historical works, can be considered as post-postmodern insofar as they retain a form of self-consciousness from postmodernism but nevertheless ‘strive[s] for a high degree of accuracy’ (Rousselot 4) in their representations. Similarly, Peter Boxall points to a return to ‘a fresh commitment to what we might call the reality of history’ (Boxall 41) in contemporary representations of the past marked by the ‘struggle towards a historical realism that remains beyond the grasp of a narrative that is alive to its own limitations’ (Boxall 64). As Katherine Harris very aptly puts it, ‘The neo-historical aesthetic acknowledges the inevitable failure of narratives about the past but . . . simultaneously and contradictorily works to create coherent stories about it that recognize their own limitations even as they attempt to overcome them’ (Harris 194). The contradiction between the novelty suggested by ‘neo’ and the past in ‘historical’ (Rousselot 3) conveys this paradox of the neo-historical. This ambivalence may also be felt in the endings provided to neo-historical narratives that do not impose a new clear-cut version but, as pointed out by James Dalrymple and Isabelle Roblin in their respective articles (see infra), leave the viewer/reader to deal with and interpret the contradictions of the character or novel. Yet, just as the neo-Victorian abandoned the self-conscious dimension to become, for instance in Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999), what Kate Mitchell calls ‘faux-Victorian fiction; novels written in the Victorian tradition that refuse to self-reflexively mark their difference from it in the characteristically parodic mode of historiographic metafiction’ (Mitchell 117), the neo-historical tones down its disruptive manner when problematising historical representation. In Carmen Perez Riu’s words, it still ‘revises history but avoids experimentation and other radical or postmodern formal gestures’ (Perez Riu 187)—to the extent that ‘critical engagement with that past may appear to be absent, while it is in fact seamlessly embedded in the text (Rousselot 5). On the other hand, some contemporary representations of history do ‘use more radical disruptions of narrative realism . . . to offer an authentic critique of Britain’s past’ (Bentley 107), examples of which can be found in novels by Kate Atkinson, David Peace and Jan Carson amongst others. In the first case, when the new approach is seamless, the term ‘neo-historical’, with its prefix that implies difference from what existed previously, may be problematic.

  • 3 To the extent that one might wonder ironically about the relevance today of L.P. Hartley’s much quo (...)

4As Zadie Smith came to find out through her reading Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Daniel Kehlman’s Measuring the World and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, ‘Not all historical fiction cosplays its era . . . . You can come at the past from an interrogative angle, or a sly remove, and some historical fiction will radically transform your perspective not just on the past but on the present’ (Smith 17). Neo-historical fictions, according to Rousselot, enable a re-appraisal of cultural events, themes and characters, and they do so by ‘push[ing] beyond what we know or think is ‘true’ about the past in order to invent new histories’ (Harris 197). In doing so, they break away from the topics and approaches of the ‘grand narratives’ (Lyotard) to favour ‘little’ ones and thus grant visibility to previously ignored aspects and figures, and address concerns of our times.3 Contemporary (neo-) historical fiction departs from nostalgia and escapism, notions often associated with traditional versions of the genre, and seems instead highly political. Giving visibility to occulted stories or offering new perspectives on periods of the past is indeed at the heart of some of the novels examined in this volume, such as Tom Crewe’s interest in a history of homosexuality in The New Life, A.S. Byatt’s focus on the late-Victorian-Edwardian progressive intellectual world in The Children’s Book and Graeme Macrae Burnet’s depiction of the life of 19th-century highland crofters in His Bloody Project, to quote but a few. The concern for our own times underlying historical fiction may translate into what Harris considers a key-characteristic of neo-historical fiction: the ‘conspicuous use of anachronisms: language, politics and images that are manifestly the product of the period in which the novels are written’ (Harris 194), when ‘a word, phrase or image that is demonstrably incongruent in its setting . . . has a particular meaning in the present that is relevant to the moment of writing rather than the past in which the novel is set’ (Harris 199). These words and images are thus a marker of the incidence of the present in the narrative of the past. Paradoxically, anachronism may convey authenticity in the sense that it goes against the traditional record of the era with the aim of giving a broader picture of a period when including—or focusing on—figures previously kept in the margins, if not dismissed, such as homosexuals or servants. Harris, however, drawing on Marie-Luise Kohlke’s work, points to a problematic aspect of this as ‘anachronistically imposing present-day ideologies onto the past positions the present as superior to the past’ (Harris 208) and neo-historical fiction ultimately ‘permits a self-congratulatory politics about history in general’ (Harris 210).

  • 4 He mentions Colm Tóibín, Colum McCann and Javier Cercas amongst others. Ironically, the way some bi (...)
  • 5 ‘the historical novel did not become a ‘recessive form’ after the First World War as Anderson claim (...)

5Looking at a similar return to the past in American letters, Ina Bergmann notes that what she refers to as ‘new Historical fiction’ bridges ‘the gap between supposedly serious and popular literatures’ whereas until recently the historical novel ‘bore the stigma of genre fiction’ (Bergmann 140). Just as traditional versions of historical fiction still exist and fill many shelves in bookshops, this stigma may not have fully disappeared—despite the commercial success mentioned earlier—if we believe Michael Lackey when he quotes or reports on several authors of biofiction as quite critical of historical fiction4 and debatably expresses the simple (and possibly erroneous) view that ‘the historical novel is a cheap literary form because it lacks the richness of creativity—the historical ‘novel’ merely copies what is’ (Lackey 2023, 43). Genre is indeed often associated with gender when considering representations of the past in fiction and visual arts. Analyses and accounts such as Georg Lukacs’s and Perry Anderson’s anchor and value historical fiction as a male genre starting with Walter Scott (see Sutherland 20) but both Diana Wallace and Kathlyn Sutherland have argued and showed that historical fiction existed before Scott and never disappeared—in fact, ‘From the 1920s to the 1970s, the historical novel flourished in Britain in the hands of women writers’ (Sutherland 18)—but women’s novels were excluded from discussions of the genre until recently.5 Until Pat Barker and Hilary Mantel, historical fiction by women tended to be dismissed as historical romance as exemplified by Georgette Heyer’s works but for Diana Wallace, following in the footsteps of Alison Light, ‘As a form . . . women’s historical fiction encompasses the radical and the conservative, popular and literary’ (Wallace 2012, 208). Wallace’s plea for ‘ways of reading women’s historical fictions that will allow us to recognize their difference from what has traditionally been regarded as “proper history” and the ‘classical historical novel’ and to value that difference rather than dismissing it as “tosh” ’ (Wallace 2012, 217) still needs to be addressed, following suit from Samantha J. Rayner and Kim Wilkins’s reappraisal of Georgette Heyer’s fiction.

6Some ten years after Rousselot’s use of the term ‘neo-historical’ in her edited collection, the following papers engage with aspects and limits of this sub-genre and of contemporary historical fiction and this issue of Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines hopes to offer a good complement to Mark Eaton and Bruce Holsinger’s stimulating edited collection Historical Fiction Now (2023).

7Periods re-imagined by contemporary historical fiction are wide-ranging, even extending to a mythical past as in Nathalie Hayne’s novels (A Thousand Ships (2019) and Stone Blind 2022) and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (2018) or a biblical one in Lewis Ben Smith The Redemption of Pontius Pilates (2015). At the other end of the temporal spectrum, ‘the recent historical novel’ is set ‘less than a dozen years in the past’ (Manshell). Jerome de Groot has observed that ‘novels about the two world wars of the twentieth century have a resonance due to their subject matter which seemingly gives them significance and importance beyond the confines of their home country’ (de Groot 2010, 93). Besides the slanted evocation in Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to Begin (2006) (examined in this special issue by Jean-Michel Ganteau), a telling example discussed here is Lucy Caldwell’s take on World War 2 when she evokes the Belfast Blitz in These Days. However, the following essays show the pervading dominance of the 19th century since the large majority of them deals with novels that revisit this period.

  • 6 According to Hilary Mantel, ‘[n]o other sort of writer has to explain their trade so often. The rea (...)
  • 7 Following Belen Vidal’s definition, ‘the term “biopic” refers to a fiction film that deals with a f (...)

8What the following contributions also reveal is the centrality of real-life events and figures in the contemporary historical novel. Biofiction refers to ‘literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure’ (Lackey 2016, 3). For David Lodge who contributed to the genre through Author, Author (2004) and A Man of Parts (2011)—respectively centred on Henry James and H.G. Wells—, it ‘takes a real person and their real history as the subject matter for imaginative exploration, using the novel’s techniques for representing subjectivity rather than the objective, evidence-based discourse of biography’ (quoted in Lackey 2016, 8). The real-life person may be actually central or/and seen through the perspective of a minor character as in Nuala O’Connor’s Miss Emily (2015) that interweaves first-person narratives by Emily Dickinson and her Irish maid. Biofiction critics and scholars are divided over the genre’s relation to history, historical fiction and authenticity which are usually expected to go hand in hand.6 Michael Lackey thus controversially argues that biofiction should neither be judged in terms of accuracy nor considered as a subgenre or a version of the historical novel. For Lackey, ‘authors of biofiction use rather than do history’ (Lackey 2023, 44): a biographical novel focuses on an individual to serve the author’s ideas, not to make him or her the representative of a social group at a given time as in historical fiction (Lackey 2022, 3, 9). It can however be contended with Monica Latham that biofiction does not evacuate the referential dimension but inserts itself within it as it ‘enables authors to . . . amplify and prolong footnotes from historical documents, and penetrate their characters’ minds in order to speculate about what they might have thought and felt’ (4). Indeed, when returning to major figures or events of the past, biofiction and the contemporary historical novel tend to echo Hilary Mantel when she says ‘my chief concern is with the interior drama of my characters’ lives’ (Mantel 2017). The neo-historical sits well with biofiction and its film variation, the biopic,7 in its combination of a search for accuracy and authenticity with self-reflexivity and ‘decentring the grand narrative[s]’ (Mantel 2017).

9The specificity of historical writing in contemporary young adult fiction is explored by Dorothea Flothow through a study of Philip Kerr’s Frederick, the Great Detective (2016) set at the time of the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. Kerr’s novel illustrates the complex nature of historical fiction today as Flothow shows how Frederick, the Great Detective combines biofictional traits, detection and intertextual references to Emil and the Detectives, a classic of children’s literature, and to the persona of its author, Erich Kästner. Flothow also argues Kerr’s novel is marked by a strong political impulse: far from being reactionary and escapist, historical fiction for children and young adults is shown to engage with sore historical facts to try and ‘ensure a better future’.

10On the screen, James Dalrymple considers the ‘self-analytic drive’ that characterises the neo-Victorian and, by extension, the neo-historical in the representation of Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner in Mike Leigh’s eponymous Mr Turner (2014). As Dalrymple demonstrates, Mr Turner is an atypical biopic that offers a commentary upon the genre. The article points for instance to the inclusion of elements of the grotesque in the biopic which go against the genre’s general tendency to idealise and idolise its subject yet without denying Turner’s artistic genius. Mr Turner thus combines criticism of his subject with the usual ‘mythmaking and dramatic license’ (5), reference to authentic episodes of Turner’s life with intertextual comments on the making of illusion.

11Tom Crewe’s novel The New Life (2023) also pertains to biofiction insofar as its main characters are real-life figures appearing under their real names: John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), a cultural historian and poet, and Henry Havelock Ellis (1837–1913). Similarly to Leigh’s Turner and Kerr’s Kastner, they are cases of what Sophie Coulombeau calls ‘the referential charactonym’, when a name is used in a work of fiction to refer to a real-life person ‘that plays a part in making a claim for truth in historical fiction (Coulombeau 25). Georges Letissier thus probes Crewe’s engagement in his first novel with real-life figures of marginality as, typically for contemporary historical fiction, one may add, it seeks to ‘reconstruct an episode of the past, which is often passed over quickly comparatively with other events’. Letissier considers not only the focus on the unrecorded in what he calls the ‘unhistorical drive’ but also Crewe’s departures from rules of writing history and reads the novel through the prism of queer historicism. Finally, Letissier shows how Crewe turns Symonds’ and Ellis’s treaty Sexual Inversion into a historical source to deliver a reflection on the queer condition.

12Peter D. Mathews’s study turns to the 18th century and the various twists on the marriage-plot through the inclusion of new and marginal perspectives in Imogen Hermes Gowar’s The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock (2018). Mathews inscribes his study in the context of a recent interest in the historical novel for slavery in the 18th century before showing how Gowar reflects on the illusion of the supposed freedom of a former slave in Virginia, now a prostitute. The article then explores the monetary dimension of relationships and marital unions to the extent that similarities between marriage and prostitution are pointed through a character who thinks the latter the better option. It finally dwells on how this transactional mindset behind the marriage-plot is eventually challenged in Gowar’s novel by an unconventional marriage.

13Sylvie Maurel engages with A.S. Byatt’s representation of history as process in The Children’s Book (2009) in which, she argues, ‘history exercises a form of predation’ on the characters, weighs down and ends up dominating storytelling. Maurel shows how The Children’s Book is an instance of neo-historical novel in its challenge to the stereotypes attached to the end of the Victorian era coupled with a high concern with accuracy visible in the emphasis on matter and objects. The article aptly concludes that Byatt reinvigorates the genre of historical fiction through the large amount of historical scholarship displayed in the novel that ‘presents itself as a legitimate form of knowledge’.

14Isabelle Roblin explores the tensions at stake in neo-historical fiction through a case study of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (2015). She shows how Burnet’s fragmented, apparently polyphonic novel combines the formal features of postmodern historical fiction with a concern for verisimilitude that is compared with Foucault’s sociological endeavour in Moi, Pierre Rivière. Just as the novel formally hesitates between fictionalisation and authenticity, it lays emphasis on the ill-treatment of a rural community in the highlands that generates the reader’s empathy for Roddy, just as unresolved doubt is also raised about the motivations of the young criminal who is the object of diverse and contradictory accounts.

15The Pendle witches and their trial in 1612 in Lancashire have been the object of much writing and rewriting. Claire Helie surveys the various uses made of them over time before dwelling on contemporary poetry by Carol Ann Duffy, Geraldine Monk, Blake Morrison (with etchings by Paula Rego) and Camille Ralphs. She explains how their poems have a neo-historical approach in their self-conscious engagement with various past writings of the episode before examining how they redress contemporary perception on the marginalised and turn the witches into symbols of agency and empowerment. Hélie finally demonstrates how various challenging forms and techniques such as ventriloquism, respelling and dislocation serve to generate reader empathy.

16Jean-Michel Ganteau’s contribution illustrates the pervasive place of history in contemporary fiction, including mainstream novels. If the three novels examined—Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier (2016), Sarah Hall’s Haweswater (2002) and Jon McGregor’s So Many Ways to Begin (2006)—do not pertain properly to the category of historical fiction, all are infused with the historical turn. Ganteau appraises how these novels somehow reinvent realism—with which historical fiction is traditionally associated—through an emphasis on materiality that pertains to what he defines as ‘a poetics of the inventory’ that here bares the past and its writing to its essentials. He relates this foregrounding of ordinary or ‘humble’ objects, elements of landscape to the neo-historical that grants visibility to the submerged or forgotten.

17This special issue concludes with an interview with Lucy Caldwell whose novel These Days was the winner of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. In her long and generous answers, Caldwell touches upon the circumstances of her writing, her search for accuracy and authenticity, her sense of responsibility when dealing with historical facts and people. She explains how the circumstances of her writing, her reading, her research and her Belfast childhood at the time of the Troubles all come together in this novel and comments on her stylistic choices such as her use of third-person narrative and present tense to narrate the past.

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Bibliographie

Anderson, Perry, ‘From Progress to Catastrophe: the Historical Novel’, London Review of Books 3.15 (28 July 2011), last accessed at https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n15/perry-anderson/from-progress-to-catastrophe on 2 July 2025.

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Notes

1 See Hilary Mantel’s reaction when asked what advice she would give to historical novelists: ‘My first thought was that there are so many different kinds of historical fiction that it’s impossible to say anything useful’ (Mantel 2023, 186).

2 See, amongst others, Keen (2006), Boccardi (2009), De Groot (2010), Lowenthal (2015), Eaton and Holsinger (2023). Jerome de Groot is currently updating his 2010 volume.

3 To the extent that one might wonder ironically about the relevance today of L.P. Hartley’s much quoted ‘The past is a different country. They do things differently there’ from The Go-Between.

4 He mentions Colm Tóibín, Colum McCann and Javier Cercas amongst others. Ironically, the way some biofictional writers apparently reject historical fiction echoes film directors who similarly refute the label ‘biopic’ for their work because of a reductive view of the genre.

5 ‘the historical novel did not become a ‘recessive form’ after the First World War as Anderson claims. Instead it became, in Britain at least, a predominantly female form. Writers as disparate as Naomi Mitchison, Rose Macaulay, Georgette Heyer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Bryher, Hilda Vaughan, Kate O’Brien, D.K. Broster, H.F.M. Prescott, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Jean Rhys reinvented the genre in radical ways’ (Wallace 2011).

6 According to Hilary Mantel, ‘[n]o other sort of writer has to explain their trade so often. The reader [of historical fiction] asks, is it true?’ (2017)

7 Following Belen Vidal’s definition, ‘the term “biopic” refers to a fiction film that deals with a figure whose existence is documented in history, and whose claims to fame or notoriety warrant the uniqueness of her story’ (Vidal 3).

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Armelle Parey, « Introduction: The (Neo-)historical in Contemporary English Literature and Visual Arts »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 69 | 2025, mis en ligne le 08 novembre 2025, consulté le 10 avril 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16813 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/158k2

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Auteur

Armelle Parey

Armelle Parey is Professor of contemporary literature in English at the Université de Caen Normandie. Her research interests include narrative endings, memory and rewritings of the past, with a special emphasis on neo-Victorianism, and adaptation studies. She has written several articles and co-directed several collections of essays or special issues on the question of endings. She is the editor of Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction (Routledge, 2019) and co-editor of Adapting Endings from Book to Screen (Routledge, 2020) and Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victrian Media, a special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies 15.1 (2024). Her book Kate Atkinson was published in 2022 by Manchester University Press. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9931-543X.

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