ABSTRACT
The past has multitudinous caparisons. It can be experienced and perceived through stories and photographs, through lessons at school, through the architecture, land and townscapes around us, through books and newspapers, through feature films, through television documentaries and dramas. Recent interest in how the past reasserts its presence has left some of the most significant aspects of contemporary life outside the frame of its regard. The auratic histories now held by landscapes, stately homes, monuments and artefacts are at last coming in for closer scrutiny, but the fictions on film and television in which an array of pasts are so immediately represented to so many, have received the most cursory of critical glances.3 Reasons for this evasion, for why the forms in which the past is most commonly experienced and enjoyed have been put to one side while the manifestations of history ‘proper’ get tackled, would themselves be worth exploring. However, this chapter has a different purpose.
