Course Description
Survey of historical fiction from its origins through contemporary developments, including analysis of shifts in the relations between world history and literature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Athena Title
World History and Fiction
Semester Course Offered
Offered every odd-numbered year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Students will be introduced to the role that historical fiction has played in the Western tradition, from the birth of the historical novel and its association with nationalism and romanticism in the nineteenth century to its shift during the twentieth century to a critique of social realism. Students will become familiar with how cultural attitudes towards fiction within historiography have shifted at different moments in history, from ancient Greek philosophy to Ranke’s positivism and recent poststructural challenges to concepts of narrative and truth. In addition to evaluating historical fiction as a potential form of historical evidence, students will improve their skills in textual interpretation by comparing the conventions, themes, and goals of history and literature. As well as developing their expository skills through different types of written assignments, students will exercise their oral and communication skills through class presentations and group projects.
Topical Outline
The course will begin with selections from Herodotus’ Histories and Aristotle’s Poetics to discuss the place of myth and fiction in early classifications of history. It will briefly detour through the epic tradition before focusing on the birth of the historical novel in nineteenth-century Europe and its subsequent export to the Americas. In addition to reading several key texts (listed below), students will be introduced to some twentieth-century theories from both disciplines about the possibilities and the limitations of historical imagination, including Georg Lukacs, R.G. Collingwood, E.H. Carr, Hayden White, and Linda Hutcheon. The latter part of the course will examine how recent examples have stressed inclusion of feminist viewpoints and minority group representation, as well as how some historians have effectively utilized literary techniques. The following is a sample syllabus of readings for a single semester: Sir Walter Scott. Waverly James Fennimore Cooper. The Last of the Mohicans Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace (excerpts) George Eliot. Middlemarch Virginia Woolf. Orlando E.L. Doctorow. Ragtime Toni Morrison. Beloved Julia Alvarez. In the Time of the Butterflies Simon Schama. Dead Uncertainties
Syllabus