Brian Hamnett examines key historical novels by Scott, Balzac, Manzoni, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Fontane, Galdos, and Tolstoy, revealing the contradictions inherent in this form of fiction and exploring the challenges writers encountered in attempting to represent a reality that linked past and present.

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


• INTRODUCTION


• PART ONE THE HISTORICAL NOVEL AS GENRE AND PROBLEM: AN ANALYTICAL AND CRITICAL EXAMINATION


• 1: An Exploration of the Categories: History, Narrative, the Novel and Romance


• 2: History and Fiction: The Trials of Separation and Reunion


• 3: The German Sturm und Drang, Historical Drama, and Early Romantic Fiction


• 4: Scottish Flowering: Turbulence or Enlightenment


• 5: Romanticism and the Historical Novel


• 6: The Historians' Response to the Historical Novel


• 7: History and Invention in the Italian Question


• PART TWO INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS AND UNSTABLE FORM: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE HISTORICAL NOVEL'S DILEMMA


• 1: The Historical Novel at mid-Century Crisis?


• 2: Is there a Way out? Two Experiments in Myth and History


• 3: Galdós and the Novel of Spanish National Identity


• 4: The Struggle for Identity and Purpose in the Russian Historical Novel: From Pushkin to Tolstoy


• 5: The German Historical Novel


• 6: Modernism and Beyond


• FICTITIOUS HISTORIES


• SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brian Hamnett was born in Colchester 1942. He studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge University from 1961 to 1967. He has taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Reading, and the University of Strathclyde. He is currently a Research Professor in the Department of History at the University of Essex. His fields of interest include Iberian and Latin-American history and literature; nineteenth- and twentieth-century (and beyond) literature, particularly in relation to history.