ABSTRACT
Historical fi ction, in addition to participating in the perpetuation of a national identity, also functions as a social expression of collective recall and thus contributes to cultural memory. The genre is well placed to disseminate a culture’s shared recollection of the past because it has at the center of its story a kernel of fact. As argued in Chapter 2, the seamless fusion of fact and fi ction in historical novels makes the perception of reality in the genre slippery. This obscurity positions readers to accept historical fi ction as factual in its entirety. Indeed the 2003 ‘Australians and the Past’ survey found that re-enactments, autobiography, museums, television, fi lm and historical novels ‘are all now viewed as constituting our cultural memory’ (Hamilton and Ashton 6).2 In this capacity historical fi ction functions to both guide memory and transmit cultural heritage.
