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Motivation: When I set out to write a novel about Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, I wanted the focus to be on her, not the Bard. However, as I developed the idea, I realised that his character was an essential component of the narrative. So how should I set about ‘inventing’ such an iconic character? In addition, how relevant were earlier versions – biographical and fictional – to this project? Though I found a wealth of material about Shakespeare and his plays, I discovered there is a substantial sub-genre of Shakespeare invention. As a writer new to historical fiction, this felt a little like putting Jesus Christ into a story – and it turned out that some writers have given Shakespeare a distinctly Messianic character. Methods: In order to invent my own version of Shakespeare, I needed to assimilate what had gone before. The line between fact and fiction was blurred, but I clarified what was known and what unknown, and established what was myth. I then researched fourteen fictional versions of Shakespeare, starting with Kenilworth (Sir Walter Scott, Constable & Co, 1821) and ending with Shakespeare’s Memory (Jorge Luis Borges, Penguin, 2001). Results: My discovery was that the invention of history is a complex imaginative and intellectual process, but each writer solves a succession of challenges in their own way. Identifying these challenges helped me to create a new Shakespeare, and to clarify my own reasons for writing this particular novel. Conclusions: Far from being a form which is nostalgic, escapist or conservative, historical fiction is continually re-inventing itself in the light of the events and ideas which are contemporary to the writer. The continuing evolution and re-acquisition of the character of William Shakespeare is an illustration of its perennial significance.

This master's thesis in creative work includes two parts: A tale and a critical study. The creative work is entitled Les fleurs de lotus, which delineates the life of a Chinese woman from the last Empire to the communist regime. The story unfolds around the bound-feet of the central character. The feet, in the different period of time, have different consequences for her. The world changes, so does the prejudice against her in various forms. The tale questions the destiny of human being in history. / The critical work explores historical novel through the study of France's novel, Les dieux ont soif. Having demonstrated that history is the main subject of this novel, I contend that skepticism forges France's vision about revolution and the destiny of human being. Then I detect some literary techniques such as repetition, contrast and irony that France uses in expressing his contemplation about historical processes.

"Encountering 'this season's retrieval': Historical Fiction, Literary Postmodernism and the Novels of Peter Ackroyd" engages the novels Peter Ackroyd has published, and situates them within broader generic considerations and critical dialogue. Part I, an extended prefatorial apparatus, places Ackroyd and his published fiction within three historicocritical contexts: the problem of author-as-reliable-source and the disparate histories of (a) the historical novel and (b) postmodernism in general (and literary postmodernism in particular). By interrogating the histories and points-of-contention of these areas, this Part aims to problematize critical discourse enveloping Ackroyd's fiction. Part II, comprised of four chapters, discusses specific groupings of Ackroyd's novels. After providing an overview of relevant aspects of the novels and their reception by critics, Chapter A, "Moulding History with Pastiche in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde. Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and Milton in America." considers the multiple functioning of pastiche—often considered a mainstay postmodern implement—in Ackroyd's work. The chapter concludes that rather than achieving a singular effect in the novels, pastiche works in divergent manners and confounds the reading of past historical actuality they ostensibly represent. Chapter B, "The Presence of the Past: Comedic and Non-Realist Historicism in The Great Fire of London and First Light." provides an overview of relevant aspects of the novels, and then analyzes how the presence of comedy in otherwise sombre historical fiction interrupts the realism of the narrative. This chapter argues that while camp comic effects disrupt the authority of quasi-historiographic techniques they cannot fully subvert realism and so create a suspensive modality. Chapter C, "PastlPresent: The Uses of History in Hawksmoor. Chatterton. The House of Doctor Dee and English Music." interrogates elements of the past-present fugue trajectories of these novels in order to problematize schematic readings of their supposed cultural politics. Finally, Chapter D, "Those Conventional Concluding Remarks: The Plato Papers. (National) History and Politics," places Ackroyd's most recent novel (one uncharacteristically set in the future) within the preoccupations of his earlier fiction. The chapter concludes with a brief outline of future scholarship that would investigate the national Englishness constructed throughout Ackroyd's biographical and novelistic work.

This study examines four historical novels written by authors from former or existing British colonies, exploring the works' activist potential, that is, their ability to function as more than just escapist reading. The novels' publication dates range over the last two hundred years, allowing the study to investigate changes in how authors use language and structure as tools to raise issues about how history is recorded. After a discussion of the origins and potential cultural work of historical fiction in general, the four novels are discussed in terms of how their styles and structures work to exclude or include certain audiences.The earliest two novels in this study, Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800) and Raja Rao's Kanthapura (1938), perform and complicate exclusion, reclaiming history by (among other things) taking possession of the language of conquest, English, and using it to push to the periphery the former (or presumptive) rulers of that language and the power associated with its use. Each novel employs a disempowered character who uses a non-standard, hybridized form of English to narrate the story. The editorial apparatus of each novel, which includes prefaces, glossaries, and footnotes, is examined in terms of how it impacts readers' reactions and comprehensionThe two contemporary novels, J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) and Caryl Phillips's Cambridge (1992), in addition to displaying the formerly silenced perspectives of Others and then enacting their erasure, employ intertextual referencing as a method of exclusion. Each novel's structure uses narrative reiteration as a method for raising questions about perspective and historical truth. Historical novels have been an important tool in generating a cohesive national consciousness in many nations over the past two hundred years. This study investigates how they can also be used to provide alternatives to that monolithic sense of the past when they depict and enact exclusion. / Department of English

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007. / Title from title screen (site viewed Feb. 19, 2008). PDF text: 217 p. ; 443 K. UMI publication number: AAT 3271923. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in microfilm and microfiche formats.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New South Wales, 1998. / Also available online.

Univ. Católica Portuguese., Diss.--Lisboa, 2002. / Mit engl Zsfassg.

Tesis (Doctor en Filosofía y Letras en Literatura Puertorriqueña y del Caribe)--Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2006. / Digitized and made available on the World Wide Web by Interamerican University of Puerto Rico, 2006.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [323]-338).