ABSTRACT

So far, the account of the historical novel that has been articulated has emphasised its strangeness as a form, and its possibility for involving complex and dissident readings. The historical novel fundamentally challenges subjectivities, offering multiple identities and historical story lines. Far from being a rigid, ordering structure History seems to provide a set of potentialities and possibilities. From its beginnings as a form the historical novel has queried, interrogated and complicated fixed ideas of selfhood, historical progression, and objectivity. This became something that was explicitly undertaken in political fashion in postmodern fiction, but had been characteristic of the genre before that. This final chapter considers further ways that historical fiction might be a disruptive genre, a series of interventions which have sought to destabilise cultural hegemonies and challenge normalities. The chapter considers how the concepts of the former chapters like the fragmentation of narrative voice, pastiche, the unravelling of genre have been applied in contemporary writing. Whilst some critics of the postmodern historical novel like Fredric Jameson see it shorn of political significance, indeed actively destructive, the work considered in this chapter mitigates against this 140reading. Historical fiction, the chapter suggests, provides a space for political intervention and reclamation; for innovation and destabilisation. The chapter is in many ways about how historical fiction can report from places made marginal and present a dissident or dissenting account of the past. However, in some of the later sections we see how alternative readings and writings of the past can be used to support a reactionary agenda. In particular, though, we look at revisionist views of history that reclaim the past on behalf of a variety of unheard voices. We also look at the ways that History is challenged, both by the telling of dissident stories and by the positing of alternative realities.