Description
Book SynopsisJohn McWilliams has written the first, much needed account of the ways the promise and threat of political revolution have informed masterpieces of the historical novel. The jolting sense of historical change caused by the French Revolution led to an immense readership for a new kind of fiction, centered on revolution, counter-revolution and warfare, which soon came to be called the historical novel. During the turbulent wake of The Declaration of the Rights of Man, promptly followed by the phenomenon of Napoleon Bonaparte, the historical novel thus served as a literary hybrid in the most positive sense of that often-dismissive term. It enabled readers to project personal hopes and anxieties about revolutionary change back into national history. While immersed in the fictive lives of genteel, often privileged heroes, readers could measure their own political convictions against the wavering loyalties of their counterparts in a previous but still familiar time. McWilliams provides close
Trade ReviewLike Martha Bowden in Descendants of Waverley (CH, Mar'17, 54-3103), McWilliams (emer., Middlebury College) insists on a continuous tradition of historical fiction going back to Walter Scott. However, McWilliams also critiques the Marxist theory that has underpinned scholarship on historical fiction since György Lukács's The Historical Novel (Russian, 1937). On the one hand, revolution is prime material for historical novel settings; on the other, though the settings may be revolutionary, the genre is not. Drawing on fiction from the Americas, Britain, France, Italy, and Russia, McWilliams identifies several structural characteristics of the genre that generate narrative stability and “restoration”—not, that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat. These include its preference for middle- and upper-class characters; its emphasis on “neutral ground” (an arena “contested by forces of the Old Order and the New, but possessed by neither”), within which the action unfolds; and its juxtaposition of the “wavering” hero, derived from Scott’s Waverley, with the “fanatics” the “eventual losers.” Except for Boris Pasternak’s downbeat Dr. Zhivago (1957), historical novels bring waverers to a chastened self-awareness that projects “hope for the cultural future” while eradicating the fanatics. An accessible, thought-provoking contribution that challenges some commonplaces in the field. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *
I find Revolution and the Historical Novel a very stimulating manuscript. It is not only well written—it is vigorously and subtly argued. It addresses issues of continuing importance and it offers many new insights into specific books. What it does with Gone with the Wind is especially impressive. -- Wayne Franklin, University of Connecticut
Table of ContentsA Legacy of Walter Scott: Historical Novels of Revolution and Counter-Revolution Foreword: A Search for Synthesis Introduction: Revolutions and Restorations 1. Metaphor: Controlling the Past 2. Scott: The Totality of History 3. Transforming the Neutral Ground 4. Waverer and Fanatic 5. Revolution and Battle Honor 6. Men under Trial: Revolutionary Justice 7. The Appeal of the Old Order: The Threat of the New 8. Women, Children & the Progressive Ending 9. New Directions 10. Conclusion: Scott’s Legacy: Flaubert and the Marxist Revolutionary Novel, 1848
