Descendants of Waverley - by Martha F Bowden (Paperback)

About the Book

Descendants of Waverley examines contemporary novelists' combination of historical authority and narrative art to create the "romance of history," authentic and accessible depictions of the past.

Book Synopsis

Descendants of Waverley examines contemporary novelists' combination of historical authority and narrative art to create the "romance of history," authentic and accessible depictions of the past.

Review Quotes

Bowden's book offers many innovative insights.... This book resembles an encyclopedia, something for everyone, with intriguing comments and examples as we go along.

Walter Scott's works shaped historical fiction as we now know it, and Bowden (Kennesaw State Univ.) argues that, far from abandoning Scott's parameters, contemporary historical novelists continue to work within them. Above all, what novelists have inherited from Scott is "romance," which counterpoints the past's difference by evoking otherwise unrecorded individual emotions and a sense of "wonder." For Bowden, this interplay of emotion, wonder, and authenticity makes a successful historical novel--one that, as she repeatedly says, can illuminate the "grey spaces" of individual lives otherwise left obscure. She praises historically appropriate intertextual and visual references (such as Jane Stevenson's use of Othello and Susan Sontag's of portraits of Emma Hamilton); argues that yoking the historical novel to other genres, like detective fiction or the Gothic, brings lost stories of personal life into a historical framework; demonstrates that biographical fiction can make the historically predetermined life of a figure like Aphra Behn "strange" once more; and suggests that historical fantasies like Lisa See's Peony in Love (2007) and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004) narrate aspects of cultural or historical difference that resist straightforward, realist representation. An accessible, unapologetically evaluative study. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

About the Author

Martha F. Bowden is professor of English at Kennesaw State University.