The (Neo-)Historical in British Literature and Visual Arts (20th-21st c.)

Le colloque international de la Société des études anglaises contemporaines (SEAC) se tiendra à Caen les 17 et 18 octobre 2024 sur le thème : “The (neo–)historical in British literature and visual arts (20th–21st centuries)” dont l’invitée sera l’autrice Lucy Caldwell.

In his overview of the historical novel 1980-2018, Jerome de Groot states: ‘It could be argued that the British historical novel is the most important, influential and enduring literary genre of the last thirty-five years’ (de Groot 2019, 169) – seemingly forever attracting more writers as is the case with Zadie Smith and her latest The Fraud (2023)advertised by Penguin as her first historical novel. The genre also enjoys large visibility in popular culture: as pointed out by Leigh Wilson, historical fiction now  ‘wins literary prizes, is the primary choice of book clubs, dominates bestseller lists and is snapped up for film and TV adaptations’ (Leigh Wilson 145). Indeed, besides the Walter Scott Prize created in 2009 and dedicated to historical fiction, the list of Booker prizewinners since the 1990s clearly reflects this prevailing interest in the past. Commercially successful, contemporary historical fiction, whether it considers historical events or focuses on social history, is regularly adapted for the screen where it features along with no less popular period drama.

The genre has however undergone many changes and variations since its early instances in the 18^th and 19^thcenturies and now takes on a great variety of guises. Robert Eaglestone thus points out “the ever more diverse and contradictory array of modes by which the past is represented, forms which far exceed the historical novel as usually conceived” (2019, 312). This renewal of interest in the past and in ways of telling it is not only obvious in the significant number of scholarly studies published in the 2000s but also in the advent of neo-Victorian fiction whose early proponents may be considered to be Jean Rhys and John Fowles but which has developed more extensively since the 1990s, notably with A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990). For Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, what is remarkable in this trend is, at least at first, its self-conscious reconstruction of memory expressed in the “neo” prefix: ‘texts (literary, filmic, audio/visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (2010, p. 4, emphasis in the original). It is this very “self-analytic drive”, this interrogation of the past that Elodie Rousselot offered to discuss in novels portraying other eras, coining the composite word ‘neo-historical’ for what she sees as a ‘sub-genre of contemporary historical fiction […] characterized by its similar creative and critical engagement with the cultural mores of the period it revisits” (Rousselot 2).