Novels

Since the 1980s, the ‘linguistic turn’ in history and the advent of New Historicism in literary criticism have led to an apparent synergy between history and literary studies, a convergence captured in Louis Montrose’s formulation, ‘the historicity of texts and the textuality of history’.1 What are the implications of this interest in the dynamic interplay of text and historical moment for the status of one literary genre – the novel – as a source? To address this, I shall focus on the nineteenthcentury novel, as its engagement with realism renders it particularly crucial to the debate. The chapter will introduce the main features of the genre before outlining how historians have used the nineteenth-century novel as a source and considering the questions raised by its deployment as historical evidence. Finally, it will analyse a passage from a late-Victorian romance, H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), to explore some of these issues.