The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction

This study brings together in one collection a variety of critical responses to late twentieth-and twenty-first-century women’s historical fiction. In different ways the essays all argue that current literary, historical, and feminist interest in the female figure of history signifies a questioning of the gendered limits of postmodernism. To this end, the collection’s tripartite structure reflects the nature of its subject matter: this is an interrogation of the gendered limits and possibilities of revisionist, fictional, and rewriting postmodernist strategies at play in women’s historical fiction. The essays in part one argue that accusations of a “distortion” to historical fact fail to attend to the possibility that writers working within this genre are creating a “performative” type of experimental fiction through revisionist devices (36). Historical fictions by writers such as Janice Galloway, Margaret Atwood, Philippa Gregory, and Hilary Mantel are invoked to illustrate the point that these texts are revising anterior constructions of gender. Illuminating as the essays are at an individual level, more of a structural connection could have perhaps been made to earlier writers of this genre, if only to underline the point that generic conventions continue to be revised; Georgette Heyer and Catherine Cookson, for example, are hardly mentioned

Aesthetics · Art · Interrogation · Literature · Performative utterance · Postmodernism · Rewriting · Sociology · Subject (documents · Variety (cybernetics · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Short Stories in Global Literature · History