Modernism and Historical Fiction - Writing the Past

Modernism and Historical Fiction: Writing the Past is the first comprehensive study of modernist historical fiction. Analysing a rich and diverse body of texts from the four nations of the British Isles and arguing for a new spatially-aware theoretical approach, it outlines a concept of modernist historical fiction which bridges the gap between Walter Scott’s novels and twentieth-century postmodern historiographic metafiction. Beginning with an exploration of how Virginia Woolf’s engagement with Scott’s novels informed her fiction, including Orlando and Flush, it then examines representations of five key historical periods (the classical world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). It shows how modernist writers, including H.D., John Cowper Powys, Helen Waddell, Naomi Mitchison, Gwyn Thomas and Sylvia Townsend Warner developed sophisticated strategies to foreground and interrogate the act of writing the past.