ABSTRACT

This chapter considers how national identity and nationalism might be discussed, critiqued, underlined, and reimagined in historical fictions. Historical fictions, as hybrids and outside the academic historical mainstream, often provide an alternative, marginal voice. They are outside certain types of organizing discourse and other to particular structural approaches to the past. Andrew Higson argues that national cinema is, like national identity, 'subject to ceaseless negotiations'. The historical fictions considered in this chapter are part of these negotiations, providing audiences with complex discussions of nationhood in order to develop the concept. In the explicit engagements with national identity and history that form the basis of this part can be seen the process by which film and television might articulate a set of historiographical arguments critiquing and undermining assertions of nation. To conclude, this chapter considers the American TV series Mad Men and the alternative spaces that popular history opens up for consideration of national identity.