ABSTRACT
The Gothic is part of history, just as history is part of the Gothic', Celia Rees writes in a blog for The History Girls, a collective of female historical novelists. Rees's use of the Gothic in her historical fiction highlights its unlikely but increasingly frequent deployment as pedagogical tool in twenty-first century children's fiction. While her novels communicate significant historical traumas – witch persecution, Native American genocide, slavery, the French Revolution – they do so by using gothic metafictional techniques to draw attention to the process of writing and interpreting history, and gothic narrative motifs to restore a voice to those hitherto excluded from historical narrative. This chapter focuses on Rees's fiction that encourages a self-reflexive questioning of the individual's relationship to history and to collective identities that goes beyond the humanistic but ultimately conservative aims of the current educational establishment. Gothic, however, is an inherently historical genre.
