ABSTRACT
The double-barrelled aspect of this book's title is quite deliberate. All the essays collected here deal in their different ways with ‘popular fictions’, but they were all, also, first published in the journal Literature and History. In that sense, then, they are quite literally ‘essays in literature and history’. More important, however, than the literal sense is their relationship to the academic disciplines of ‘Literature’ and ‘History’. For they are presented here not simply as interesting pieces in their own right, but also as significant contributions to an area of knowledge that can legitimately be called Literature-and-History. Moreover, they bear on this concept in another way: they are also part of the history of the journal itself, and we would like to suggest that this is also how they should be read. The appearance of these essays was not fortuitous: the editorial group of Literature and History was eager to publish them because they helped the journal explore the concept of ‘popular fictions’, and also indicated ways in which the disciplines of Literature and History could come together to break down the methodologies, epistemologies and pedagogies that keep them apart. *
