ABSTRACT
Georg Lukács admitted in his pioneering work The Historical Novel, first published in Russian in 1937 and reissued in English in 1960, that a study of the historical novel was 'almost virgin territory'. Literary scholars have been divided in their approach to such works, expressing uncertainty as to whether they can be defined as 'historical novels'. The importance of history for the twentieth-century European novel is, however, demonstrated by the fact that many modern writers have chosen to deal in works of fiction with historical events in the present or the recent past because they themselves have experienced historical cataclysms in their own lives. The evolution of the documented historical novel is related both to the development of the novel form and to changing attitudes towards historical scholarship. A useful distinction has been drawn by Gasiorowska between conventional historical novels, in which historical characters remain outsiders whose role is limited to ensuring in the reader's imagination.
