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Revolution and the Historical Novel (Paperback)
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Revolution and the Historical Novel (Paperback)
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John 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 readings of some twenty historical
novels, from Scott and Cooper through Tolstoy, Zola and Hugo, to
Pasternak and Lampedusa, and ultimately to Marquez and Hilary
Mantel, but with continuing regard to historical contexts past and
present. He traces the transformation of the literary conventions
established by Scott's Waverley novels, showing both the
continuities and the changes needed to meet contemporary times and
perspectives. Although the progressive hopes imbedded in Scott's
narrative form proved no longer adaptable to twentieth century
carnage and the rise of totalitarianism, the meaning of any single
novel emerges through comparison to the tradition of its
predecessors. A foreword and epilogue explore the indebtedness of
McWilliams's perspective to the Marxist scholarly tradition of
Georg Lukacs and Frederic Jameson, while defining his differences
from them. This is a scholarly work of no small ambition and
achievement.
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