Chapter 8: “Fiction as History: Some Comparative Observations”

The relationship between fiction and experience differs according to each novelist’s intentions, since the subject matter of novels can range from the purely imaginative to concrete historical situations. Many American novelists in the twentieth century have chosen to deal explicitly with historical themes and occurrences. In doing so, they have followed popular nineteenthcentury precedents, both American and English. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels recreated vividly the triumph of Anglo-Saxonism in the forested frontier. The great literary historian Francis Parkman has explicitly acknowledged his inspiration from Cooper. In England, Sir Walter Scott limned the historical milieu of the chivalric age in his Waverly novels, while Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, and Elizabeth Gaskell wrote novels of social protest, revealing richly the history of industrialized English cities.