Into the Twentieth Century

This chapter looks at multiple ways that the historical novel has been articulated and reinvented during the twentieth century, as a means for exploring the form’s multiplicity and complexity. During the twentieth century the historical novel became a prevalent sub-genre but also one which was often marginalised in discussion of the novel as a form. The chapter looks at the ongoing theorisation of the historical novel by a variety of now relatively obscure critics as a means for contextualising the overly influential writing of Georg Lukács. The chapter moves to consider literary Modernism and the historical novel, discussing the ways in which ‘history’ was imagined, rethought, and reworked in writings that might be thought of as novels about history, rather than historical novels. This section considers key works by James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Dorothy Richardson, with a particular extended focus on Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf.