The Anxiety of Authenticity
Writing Historical Fiction at the End of the Twentieth Century
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4493946 |
|---|---|
| Authors | M Margaronis (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 138-160 |
| Publication date | 2008-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History Workshop Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/hwj/dbm070 |
| OpenAlex | W1982184364 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 4 |
fact and fantasy. All fiction is written on this territory, but when the work explicitly engages with historical events when it is part of the writer's project to reimagine them the ground becomes a minefield of hard questions. What responsibility does a novelist have to the historical record? How much and what kinds of things is it permissible to invent? For the purposes of fiction, what counts as evidence? What are the moral implications of taking someone else's experience, especially the experience of suffering and pain, and giving it the gloss of form? Can imaginative language discover truths about the past that are unavailable to more discursive writing? The last few decades have seen an outpouring of novels in English set in times of war or violence, many of them by writers born after 1945 who have themselves lived through a long period of peace. are many personal reasons why someone might choose to relive the violence and suffer ing experienced by earlier generations, but there are also more public explanations. Our culture has an enormous appetite for imagined violence and extreme emotions; war-time fiction sells. The Hungarian marxist critic Georg Lukacs, writing about the historical novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, argued that the hunger for this kind of vicarious intensity is a symptom of our disconnection from historical forces: Tt is precisely the longing to escape from the triviality of modern bourgeois life which produces these historical themes. One of the most important means of producing... pseudo-monumentality is the emphasis on brutality.'1 His social analysis, though, ignores the long history of our fascination with violence. Since the second half of the twentieth century the task has taken on a new complexity.
Anxiety · Art · Literature · Psychiatry · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.67 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2026 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |