Course Pack:
Introduction

Introduction to Historical Fiction:
Two by Thomas Mallon
Online Course Pack

“[T]wo occasions...best call for the historical novelist: when the facts have been lost to time, and when a time has been lost to the facts.”

From "Writing Historical Fiction"
By Thomas Mallon

"John Updike has written, in an article published in Picked-up Pieces (1975), that in fiction "reality is--chemically, atomically, biologically--a fabric of microscopic accuracies." Only through these tiny, literal accuracies can the historical novelist achieve the larger truth to which he aspires--namely, an overall feeling of authenticity. It is just like Marianne Moore's famous prescription for the ideal poet: He must stock his imaginary garden with real toads.

"Every historical novelist will decide these things differently, will calibrate his fidelity to the real past along a different scale."

Mallon's own historical research has yielded much that he might not have been able to imagine on his own.  "The point is that I didn't need to. It was there, real. I am not saying that truth is always stranger than fiction, but I would assert that the historical novelist quickly finds that the history in which he must work is not so much a straitjacket as a chariot.

"To a certain degree I am romancing the past, but that is one's privilege with it. One does not have to fear the past . . . ."

"Why, finally, does one read historical fiction?"  Mallon believes that "we no longer go to historical fiction for explanation so much as for exoticism. Georg Lukacs, the pre-eminent Marxist critic of the genre, lamented in The Historical Novel how, a century after Sir Walter Scott, whose historical fiction was prized for its relevance, historical novels were being read because they were so irrelevant, so appealingly strange.