ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers how the past and imaginative art are bound up in the praxis termed historical fiction. When justifying writing about the case of Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper, the novelist David Peace considered the ethics of fictionalizing horrific events: he argues that his particular form of narrating the past the novel achieves something beyond the scope or the aim of mainstream historical discourse. As Marnie Hughes-Warrington has argued about historical film. The book considers fictional engagement with 'how and why histories are made'. They are ways of exploring and engaging that are fundamentally fictional, while generally using the realist mode to suggest rational truthfulness of some kind. It is uncommon still for scholarship to look seriously at the ways in which historical fictions work. Remaking history looks at anglophone film, television, and novels.
