In writing I certainly understood myself to be writing a novel set in the Worthless Men past, and by that token a novel, but I had little sense of engaging with a ‘historical’ distinct genre, the In Jerome de historical ‘historical novel’. Groot’s introductory guide, writing is fictional locales: romance, detective, thriller, identified ‘within numerous counterfactual, horror, literary, gothic, post-modern, epic, fantasy, history, western, children’s an array of so extensive it appears to deny any books’ (2010: 2), ‘locales’ possibility of generic specificity. The historical novel emerges instead as a tendency or orientation available to almost all other de Groot continues, genres. ‘Indeed,’ ‘the intergeneric hybridity and flexibility of historical fiction have long been one of its which may be as much as to concede that it is so mutable as defining characteristics’ (2), to have no defining characteristics other than an interest in history, whether as subject or setting. For myself, in so far as I had any awareness of the I took it to ‘historical novel’, mean one of two things: those novels of the nineteenth century discussed in Georg (1962), which I had studied as an undergraduate, and the The Historical Novel Lukács’s popular romance novels of costumery and swashbuckling that Perry Anderson describes as of a remote past with no living connection to contemporary ‘decadent representations existence, but functioning rather as a rejection and escape from I them’ (Anderson 2011). was attracted to neither possibility. My acquaintance with Lukács would have been recent history to the young man conducting oral history interviews in the mid-eighties, but had become ancient history to the novelist writing My recollection was of a somewhat forbidding range Worthless Men. of exemplars (books I had never been able to finish) and an equally forbidding set of
In writing Worthless Men I certainly understood myself to be writing a novel set in the past, and by that token a ‘historical’ novel, but I had little sense of engaging with a distinct genre, the ‘historical novel’. In Jerome de Groot’s introductory guide, historical writing is identified ‘within numerous fictional locales: romance, detective, thriller, counterfactual, horror, literary, gothic, post-modern, epic, fantasy, history, western, children’s books’ (2010: 2), an array of ‘locales’ so extensive it appears to deny any possibility of generic specificity. The historical novel emerges instead as a tendency or orientation available to almost all other genres. ‘Indeed,’ de Groot continues, ‘the intergeneric hybridity and flexibility of historical fiction have long been one of its defining characteristics’ (2), which may be as much as to concede that it is so mutable as to have no defining characteristics other than an interest in history, whether as subject or setting. For myself, in so far as I had any awareness of the ‘historical novel’, I took it to mean one of two things: those novels of the nineteenth century discussed in Georg Lukács’s The Historical Novel (1962), which I had studied as an undergraduate, and the popular romance novels of costumery and swashbuckling that Perry Anderson describes as ‘decadent representations of a remote past with no living connection to contemporary existence, but functioning rather as a rejection and escape from them’ (Anderson 2011). I was attracted to neither possibility. My acquaintance with Lukács would have been recent history to the young man conducting oral history interviews in the mid-eighties, but had become ancient history to the novelist writing Worthless Men. My recollection was of a somewhat forbidding range of exemplars (books I had never been able to finish) and an equally forbidding set of
history_FINAL.docx