Historical Fiction Discussion
Thursday February 23, 2006
What is the essence of historical fiction? If you took out the historical setting but kept the historical figures in could you still meaningfully label it "historical fiction"? What about the opposite?
From the Forum:
From the Forum:
- "In historical fiction, what would be the sense of calling it thus if one ignored the historical background of the story? You can leave historical personages out, but you do have to work within the socio-historical framework. A good example for this is A God Strolling in the Cool of the Evening, by Mario de Carvalho, which has narily a historical figure in it, but deals with the tensions of religion in the time of the emperor Marcus Aurelius.
I'm not a purist and I do like the book immensely, but I remember when way-back-when we discussed it in our reading group, some people objected to lack of historical figures, ignoring the fact that the framework of the book was the history of the time."
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