A unique and exciting introduction to the genre and craft of historical fiction, for curious students, aspiring authors--anyone with a passion for the past. Read classics of the genre, encounter bestselling writers of historical fiction, and discover your own historical archive while interacting with a global community of interested readers.
From Archive to Novel
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来自 University of Virginia 的课程
瘟疫，巫婆，和战争：世界历史小说
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从本节课中
What is Historical Fiction?
In this module Professor Holsinger details the history of the historical fiction novel through the 18th and 19th centuries.
与讲师见面
Bruce HolsingerProfessor
English
This lecture addresses the relationship between fiction and the
archive, between the historical novel and the historical sources that
authors use to research, imagine, and write the scenes,
characters, and setting making up the worlds of historical fiction.
You'll have an assignment on the archive to complete before the end of this
course, so I hope this lecture will
help you think about what constitutes an archive.
And how the archive can be imagined in any number of ways.
On the most basic
level, you can think of an archive as a repository of primary
sources, which begs another question, of course, what is a primary source?
Let's look at a definition of primary sources that comes
from a particular authority on the matter, the Library of Congress.
According to their definition, primary sources are the raw materials of history,
original documents and objects which were created at the time under study.
They are different from secondary
sources, accounts or interpretations of events
created by someone without firsthand experience.
That phrase raw materials is a particularly
helpful one for the purposes of this
class How do fiction writers employ the
raw materials of history in creating fiction?
What sorts of raw materials do they use, and where do they find them?
How do they adapt them to the medium of prose fiction,
and how might these primary sources become part of the reading experience
for an author's audience.
And finally how can we use these primary sources
as an interpretive lens under the text of historical fiction.
In other words, what can reading these primary sources tell
us about the texts that employ them in various ways.
Historical novelist draw on an infinity
of primary sources in writing their narratives.
Memoirs, diaries and letters, legal documents,
like depositions or wills, art works,
and buildings, parish registers, religious writings,
old poetry, old cars, old news papers.
Virtually anything you can think of is fair
game for the archival work of the historical novelist.
So let me give you just a few specific examples of the kinds of
archival sources employed by writers of historical
fiction, some of them on our syllabus.
One of the authors we'll meet later in this course is Mary Beth Keane.
Whose novel Fever takes as its subject
Mary Melon, otherwise known as typhoid Mary.
The first person identified in the United States as an immune carrier of typhoid.
One of the most significant primary sources Keane uses in this novel
is a letter written by Mallon herself in the summer of 1909.
This was during her involuntary quarantine on an island in the East River.
The letter is six pages long.
And it's a vividly personal account of Mallons dealings with the doctors,
nurses, psychologists, and others in the New
York hospital, where she remained for two years.
Here's an excerpt from that letter.
There was never any effort by the Board
authority to do anything for me excepting to
cast me on the island and keep me
a prisoner without being sick nor needing medical treatment.
When I first came here, I was so
nervous, and almost prostrated with grief and trouble.
My eyes began to twitch, and the left eyelid
became paralyzed and would not move.
It remained in that condition for six months.
I have been in fact a peep show for everybody.
Even the interns had to come to see me and
ask about the facts already known to the whole wide world.
The tuberculosis men would say, there she is, the kidnapped woman.
This is one of the only extant primary sources written in Mallon's
own voice, so it was naturally an invaluable piece of history for
Mary Beth Keane in writing her novel.
As Keane said of the letter in an interview, it's the
only thing I found in her voice, written in her hand.
You can feel her frustration and how angry she was about being held.
But this, for the fiction writer, made it more appealing.
I could get a sense of her personality without having to stick to the script.
I could invent her completely, while feeling that I was getting it right.
So by reading this primary source, this impassioned letter in the voice of an
historical subject, Keane was able to get
an authentic sense of Mallon's interior life.
And it became an invaluable resource in the writing of Fever.
Now obviously, not every figure who becomes the subject of a historical
novel has personal letters surviving in her own hand and her own voice.
But letters, when they do exist, are an invaluable primary source for
historical fiction.
Where else do writers look for primary sources?
What other kinds of raw materials do they
mine in creating the imaginative worlds of historical fiction?
Well, not all primary sources are written sources,
and not all archives are made up of paper.
Let's take a look at a few sentences from James Fenimore
Cooper's The Deerslayer, one of the five novels in his Leatherstocking Tales.
In this scene the characters Hurry and Natty Bumppo
are paddling a canoe on a lake in upstate New York.
The men now plied the paddles again, and they were presently within a
few yards of the rock, floating towards it, though their efforts were suspended.
This rock was not large, being merely some five or six feet high.
Only half of which elevation rose above the lake.
The incessant washing of the water for centuries and so
rounded it's summit, that it resembled a large beehive in shape.
It's form being more than usually regular and even.
Hurry remarked as they floated slowly past that this rock was
well known to all the Indians in that part of the country.
And that they were in the practice of using it as a mark
to designate the place of meeting, when separated by their hunts and marches.
Now this is a scene from a novel of course, a work of fiction.
But what Cooper is describing here is an actual body of water, Otsego
Lake in upstate New York.
And it's clear he spent a lot of time thinking about the
natural landscape of this region and how to incorporate it into his novel.
Here's how Cooper described his approach to setting.
This is a passage from the preface to the Leatherstocking tales.
And we can see how he understands the landscape itself.
The lake, a rock, a shoal as a
primary source for the writing of historical fiction.
In most respects, the descriptions
of scenery in the tale are reasonably accurate.
The rock appointed for the rendezvous between the Deerslayer and his
friend the Delaware still remains, bearing the name of the Otsego Rock.
The shoal on which Hutter is represented as having built his castle is
a little misplaced, lying in fact nearer to the northern end of the lake.
As well as to the Eastern Shore, than is stated in this book.
Such a shoal however exists, surrounded on all sides by deep water.
In the driest seasons a few rocks are seen above the surface of
the lake, and rushes, at most periods of the year, mark it's locality.
In a word in all but precise position, even this feature of the book is accurate.
The same is true of the several points introduced.
Of the bays, of the river, of the mountains
and of all the other accessories of the place.
Here's a photograph of the exposed stone Cooper calls Otsego Rock,
also called Council Rock.
Taken from a book on the old New
York frontier, published in the early 20th Century.
Think about how strongly Cooper insists on the accuracy of his
book, down to the shoreline of a lake in upstate New York.
And it's the rock itself that grounds the whole account, giving us a nice
metaphor for the solidity of Cooper's research,
and its fixity in a particular geographical locality.
For Cooper, the natural environment
is itself an archive.
While a rock in the middle of a
lake becomes a primary source for historical invention.
But just knowing what primary sources are employed
by an author doesn't get you very far.
We also have to know how any given primary source is used
within a particular scene or chapter,
and how it's transformed by fictional representation.
Let's take one particular example from a recent historical novel.
Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies,
the sequel to Wolf Hall.
The novel treats the events leading up to the imprisonment of Anne
Boleyn and the Tower of London in 1536, and her subsequent execution.
It's written in a present tense third person point of view from the perspective
of Thomas Cromwell, a statesman and minister in the court of Henry the Eighth.
What you see on the screen is a letter written by William
Kingston, the Constable of the Tower of London, on May 19th 1536.
The day of Anne Boleyn's execution.
The letter, addressed to Cromwell, relates an exchange
Kingston had with Boleyn during her final hours,
and it seems intended to let Cromwell know
Boleyn's state of mind as she awaits her death.
Here's a transcription of the letter in the modern spelling.
This morning she sent for me, that I might be
with her at such time as she received the good Lord.
To the intent I should hear her speaking as
touching her innocence always to be clear.
And in the writing of this she sent for me, and at my coming she said.
Mr. Kingston I hear I shall not die afore noon, and I am very
sorry therefore, for I thought to be dead by this time and past my pain.
I told her it should be no pain, it was so little.
And then she said, I heard say the executioner
was very good, and I have a little neck.
And then put her hands about it, laughing heartily.
I have seen many men and also women executed, and that they have been
in great sorrow, and to my knowledge this lady has much joy in death.
As you can imagine, this is an extraordinary and notorious
moment in the story of Anne Boleyn's life and death.
A prisoner about to be executed, putting her hands around her neck.
And making a joke about how small it is,
suggesting that it shouldn't give the executioner much trouble.
Now let's look at what Hilary Mantel does
with this archival source in Bring Up the Bodies.
This is a scene that takes place late in
the novel while Anne Boleyn is in the tower.
But unlike Kingston's historical letter written on the
day of the execution itself, this scene takes place
several days before the execution, when Cromwell himself comes
to visit Boleyn in her rooms in the tower.
Cromwell knows her for a woman without remorse.
He believes she would commit any sin or crime.
He believes she is her father's daughter, that never since childhood has
she taken any action, coaxed or coerced, that might damage her own interests.
But in one gesture, she has damaged them now.
She has seen his face change.
She steps back, puts her hand around her throat.
Like a strangler she closes them
around her own flesh. I have only a little neck, she says.
It will be the work of the moment. Kingston hurries out to meet him.
He wants to talk.
She keeps doing that, her hands around her neck and laughing.
His honest jailer's face is dismayed.
I cannot see that is any occasion for laughter.
So look at what Mantel has done here.
She's taken some words spoken by Anne Boleyn that we know about only from
Kingston's letter written on the day of her execution, I have a little neck.
And created a harrowing moment of recognition and pathos.
And notice that it's Cromwell, Mantel's viewpoint character,
who has this exchange with Boleyn in the novel.
Not Kingston, who actually reports it in the historical letter.
This heightens the immediacy
of the exchange of course.
But it also takes real lib-, liberties with
the archival source on which the scene is based.
Mantel's retelling of this historical moment, imagines
that Anne has spoken about her little neck
on previous occasions, and that she said
it in the hearing of her viewpoint character.
But notice how Mantel protects herself brilliantly against the charge of
inaccuracy by having Kingston say she keeps doing that, creating the fiction
that she' s done it previously.
And thus that Cromwell could have heard her doing it.
And not only that, but Mantel inserts a simile that takes
Anne's historical gesture and turns it into the stuff of horror.
She steps back, puts her hand around her throat.
Like a strangler she closes them around her own flesh.
Like a strangler.
The simile tells you everything you need to
know about how great historical fiction works with the
archive, honoring the historical contract it draws with the reader.
Yet always flirting with the boundaries of the plausible.
So this one example shows us how an author can remain faithful to a
historical source, while also using it as
a point of departure for speculation and invention.
More broadly, one of the most forewarning ways we can begin
to interpret historical fiction, comes from
that awareness of the primary sources.
The particular archives
that authors are drawing from as they put together their narratives.
The translation of the archive into the pages of fiction
is one of the biggest challenges of writing historical fiction.
And as I hope you'll discover, one of
the great pleasures in interpreting and understanding it.
