Even at the height of its popularity in the early nineteenth century, the historical novel faced criticism at many levels. After its predominance in the 1810s and 1820s, writers and historians shunned it as a travesty of their respective disciplines. Even so, the historical novel has frequently attracted a wide-ranging public right up to the present day. My book is not a history of the historical novel. I examine key novels which reveal the contradictions in this form of fiction and expose the dilemma writers encountered in their attempt at a representation of reality, linking past and present ... More

Even at the height of its popularity in the early nineteenth century, the historical novel faced criticism at many levels. After its predominance in the 1810s and 1820s, writers and historians shunned it as a travesty of their respective disciplines. Even so, the historical novel has frequently attracted a wide-ranging public right up to the present day. My book is not a history of the historical novel. I examine key novels which reveal the contradictions in this form of fiction and expose the dilemma writers encountered in their attempt at a representation of reality, linking past and present issues. My approach is comparative and pan-European, though not all-inclusive. I argue that the historical novel in the nineteenth century was a common European phenomenon with considerable interconnection of themes and periods. Accordingly, the book ranges from the British Isles and France through the Germanic territories, Italy, and Spain, to the Russian Empire, identifying the different objectives and phases of the historical novel. Although historical novels or novels with history in their titles did appear in the two previous centuries, the historical novel came to maturity in the nineteenth century-a consequence of the developing nature of history as a discipline distinct from literature and philosophy, and the increasing primacy of the novel for writers and the reading public. Yet the frontiers between history and literature remained blurred, and the two disciplines continued to influence one another. Each sought a faithful representation of human experience.