From Trauma to Love, from Experiment to Tradition: Contemporary British Historical Romances and Historiography

Summary

The well-known and frequently pointed out interconnections between the novel as a literary form and history reach back at least to the beginnings of the novel; they are, in fact, even older, present already in one of the oldest fictional forms, that is in Greek romances. In various shapes and forms, then, the interest in the past and the attempts to present it in fiction, seem to accompany literature practically from its very beginnings. Due to its long duration, this interest has undergone profound shifts of forms and conceptualisations, has been variously practised and assessed; it seems, however, a constant rather than a fleeting feature of fiction. Likewise, the connection between history and romance seems much older than the commonly commented combination of the two introduced and developed by Sir Walter Scott. As the examples of such ancient Greek classics as Argonautica or Ethiopica suggest, the interest in the past is a salient feature of surprisingly many romantically-oriented love stories, and the combination of romance and history proves to be almost as old as fiction itself. As Robert Scholes, James Phelan and Robert Kellogg observe in The Nature of Narrative, in the clearly erotically oriented ancient romances the interest in history, the description of customs and the appearance of characters representing historical figures is a common feature (Scholles et al. 2006: 67-68). Despite their adventurous drive and contrived plots, Greek romances exhibit a similar tendency to that found in Greek historiography, as represented famously for instance by Herodotus, that is the ambition to describe people and their customs and to provide a comprehensive, encyclopaedic picture of a culture and its past. Greek romances, then, come close to the historiography of their times, and their treatment of the past, though clearly of secondary importance when compared to the amorous adventures, points both to the importance of historical elements, and to the connections between historiography and fiction.

Thus, the relatively recent revival of interest both in “fictions of history” and in literary romances may seem hardly a coincidence; rather, it may be interpreted as a return to a very old and venerable tradition.