History and Fiction

Abstract

It has been claimed, with increasing intensity of late, that both history and fiction are in a state of crisis. Fiction, it is constantly lamented; is being outsold, outread and pretty much out done by 'reality'. History's decline, it's argued, is intimately connected to what is regarded as its increasingly political (and therefore inherently unreliable) bent - and this decline has been accompanied by the invidious rise of the 'novelist as historian'. On both sides there have been complaints about border incursions: the encroachments made by history and purported autobiography into fictive realms; the so-called development of the hybrid category 'faction', and the claims made of, and by, the fictionalisers of history that they can provide a truer, more objective and more trustworthy account of the past than can historians.