‘Irish Working-Class Novels after 1950’ begins by drawing a distinction between British working-class fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, and its Irish counterpart, which remained preoccupied with poverty. Starting with novels such as Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy (1958), the work of Paul Smith, Lee Dunne’s Goodbye to the Hill (1965), and Maurice Leitch’s The Liberty Lad (1965), it is argued that finding forms of freedom – including sexual freedom – in the context of class-based poverty becomes a central concern of Irish working-class fiction in this period, in the process opening out new possibilities in Irish fiction per se. This is particularly true of Joseph Plunkett’s Strumpet City (1969), a historical novel dealing with the 1913 Lockout, and Frances Molloy’s Troubles novel, No Mate for the Magpie (1985). Finally, in the work of Dermot Bolger and Roddy Doyle, writing about working-class life pushed at the limits of literary and cultural norms.

This chapter considers the Latin poetry of medieval English poet John Gower, who became blind in later life. Gower recursively revises own poetry as his blindness increases, and he establishes a potent discourse of blind life writing that self-identified Blind advocates would later adopt in their international mission to advocate for disabled people. In addressing Gower’s life as portrayed in modern-day media (i.e., mystery novels and audiobooks, including medievalist Bruce Holsinger’s historical fiction series A Burnable Book), this chapter considers modern paradigms of “close listening” alongside works by blind theorist and memoirist Georgina Kleege. Nineteenth-century compilations of Blind authors discussed in this chapter include James Wilson’s Biography of the Blind (1838) and William Hanks Levy’s Blindness and the Blind (1872). Gower’s poetry offers a compelling early model of disability-centered poetics, reorienting English literary tradition and reception history through blindness as well as foregrounding the intimacy of authors and readers.

Chapter 25 delves into Ana Maria Gonçalves’ 2006 Um defeito de cor. The novel opens with a stark portrayal of the brutal realities of the transatlantic slave trade and the harsh labor endured in nineteenth-century Brazil, evoking deep, collective trauma. Yet Gonçalves’ work defies the typical mold of historical fiction. Instead, Um defeito de cor expands the understanding of history by weaving in Afro-diasporic ritual objects, practices, and belief systems. These cultural elements reshape memory as the story of Kehinde, the protagonist of the novel, unfolds. Through this approach, history becomes both a discovery that feels familiar and a recognition that surprises. This complex interplay is captured, for instance, in the idea of serendipitous encounters, a concept also rooted in African traditions. In the end, the novel carves out a space for the literary assentamento (settlement) of an Afro-Atlantic identity and existence.

Chapter 1 explores the beginnings of the Brazilian novel, diving into the social and cultural environment that shaped its emergence. It looks beyond simple historical facts to uncover the backdrop that allowed this literary form to take root in Brazil. Central to the chapter are two pioneering works in the genre: Teixeira e Sousa’s 1843 novel, O filho do pescador, which holds the distinction of being the first recognized Brazilian novel, and Joaquim Manuel de Macedo’s 1844 A moreninha, often regarded as the first true Brazilian novel in practice. The chapter also charts the development of historical fiction within Brazilian literature, highlighting the progression from these early novels to more mature works. Key milestones include José de Alencar’s landmark 1857 novel O guarani and Maria Firmina dos Reis’ 1859 novel Úrsula, both of which helped define the trajectory of the genre’s growth in the country.

This chapter implicitly responds to other chapters’ examination of imperial ideologies of time as well as their insistence on alternative temporalities. It does so by addressing the meanings and lived experiences of empire and its waves of apocalypse from the point of view of early Native literary studies and contemporary Native literary studies. In this chapter, literary categories open up history and demand that we see and think about periodization itself. Through a brief survey of early and contemporary texts, the chapter introduces readers to early (North American) Native studies and contemporary US Native literary studies, showing how both these overlapping bodies of literature helps us to see and better understand empire and ongoing imperial formations.

This chapter characterises the beginning of the 1810s as a transitional moment for both early feminist thought and cultural conceptions of intellectual disability. Through a sustained reading of Lucy Aikin’s critically underexamined Epistles on Women (1810), the chapter argues that the long, combative poem articulates an intersectional appeal to feminine-coded weakness, idiocy, and disability. The opening question of the poem, ‘when was ever weakness in the right?’, pits a utopian matriarchal future against the overwhelming misogyny and brutality of the masculinist past. Aikin’s revisionist history begins in Eden with Eve’s assiduous care for the ‘moping idiot’ Adam and ends in the modern era with the new ideal of feminine friendship supplanting compulsory ideologies of heteropatriarchal marriage. Throughout, Aikin creatively develops a compelling feminist aesthetics and ethics grounded in the complex trope of idiocy and neurodiversity.

Several contemporary works of Afro-Asian fiction turn simultaneously to the past and the ocean to challenge ethnically exclusive, territorial models of national belonging in the present, generating alternative cartographies interlinking the Indian Ocean world. This means the past is not simply a background against which their narratives unfold—that is, their historical setting—but the past itself functions as an intertext through which an Indian Ocean world gets reimagined. The Introduction examines the rhetoric of loss and recovery in Indian Ocean discourses as a way to theorize the Indian Ocean as a spatio-temporal scale for analyzing literature’s relationship to the past. It explicates the term “anarchival drift” as a self-reflexive mode of addressing the past in Afro-Asian fiction. This historical orientation in literature is not driven by a nostalgic desire to recover the past but rather it serves to excavate the historicity of the present. The chapter illustrates this through a reading of romance and history in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992).

Many eighteenth-century theorists of common law attributed its legitimacy in part to its connection to a particular location and history. However, as Britain incorporated Scotland and expanded its imperial reach abroad, British governors often attempted to carry common-law practices to new locations. In his fiction and nonfiction, Sir Walter Scott advocates maintaining Scotland’s common-law system but worries that the very cultural and legal distinctiveness he demands for Scotland prevents Scots from receiving justice under British law. Portraying the consequences of the Norman conquest in Ivanhoe (1819) and internal and external colonialism in Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), Scott demonstrates the difficulties of reconciling the role of custom in common law’s legitimacy with a centralizing imperial state. In both works, the victors’ biases toward their own law mean that history and historical fiction no longer suture past and present, and that law imposes tragedy as well as order.

This chapter argues that the resurgence of genre fiction in the contemporary period demonstrates alterations in the status of romance kinds rather than the direct impact of postmodernism. Novels make possible worlds; the actions staged in imagined worlds need not be verisimilar or plausible. Though realism has been the dominant mode of the novel, it is not the only option, especially for writers who have read widely in genre fiction since childhood. Postmodernism is not required to explain why the characteristics of romance narratives persist. Genre fiction’s thrilling plots, strong affects of suspense, curiosity, and wonder, larger-than-life characters, and reliance on supernatural explanations or conspiracy theories, have invigorated contemporary fiction. Postmodernism is best understood as a style whose adoption expresses a writer’s desire to be considered experimental, irreverent, up-to-date, and still “literary.” Emergent patterns of prize-winning novels show the erosion of the distinction between literary and genre fiction.

This chapter names and surveys a racially attuned subgenre of US historical fiction, the historical novel of whiteness. It studies a variety of authors from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, all of whom used the historical novel form to question the coherence and ontological status of “whiteness” as a racial concept. The essay focuses on three historically situated companies of works that epitomize the subgenre: novels of European–Native American contact from the 1820s, “color-line” novels from the Jim Crow era, and African American historical fiction from the post-1945 period. In all the novels under review, whiteness is shown to be a mutable, contingent, surprisingly unstable phenomenon, even as it is also shown to have been a powerful, all but hegemonic force throughout US history.

The later nineteenth century saw expanded editions of Pepys’s diary by Lord Braybrooke (1848-49), Mynors Bright (1875–79), and Henry Wheatley (1893–99). This chapter surveys the publication of these editions and the responses to them as Pepys’s fame grew. Each new edition was accompanied by swirling rumours about what was left out. The diary inspired parodies, paintings, historical fiction, and articles in children’s magazines. A dominant theme in these creative responses was imagining what the censored texts had omitted, especially about the women in Pepys’s life. By the late nineteenth century, Pepys featured in formal education as a representative of the Restoration, but his name was also shorthand for unorthodox and fun history. The popularity of the comical version of Pepys sparked discussions about the purpose of history, notably via stress on Pepys’s role in naval and imperial history.

The first half of the twentieth century saw a veritable industry spring up around Pepys. Three best-selling biographies by Arthur Bryant were influential in establishing Pepys as an English hero, while novels about Pepys’s wife Elizabeth mocked attitudes towards the diary advocated in mainstream historical works. Spurring much of this interest, however, was the experience of two world wars. To trace the roles the diary performed during wartime this chapter looks at three very different productions: the long-running diary parody by R. M. Freeman (1909–46); the war diaries of one of Pepys’s readers, Constance Miles (1939–43); and the post-war BBC drama The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1958). In wartime, Pepys’s portrayal as an ‘ordinary’ Englishman proved more effective than his representation as a heroic figure. The journal and its adaptations legitimated a range of emotional responses to disturbing times.

The development of the novel of ideas has at times been closely related to the development of another literary form that emerged out of the social and political transformations of nineteenth-century Britain: the historical novel. With a glance back at a prototype of both forms – the fiction of Sir Walter Scott – this chapter moves on to discuss the work of one of Scott’s unlikeliest yet most significant inheritors, the Scottish socialist and feminist novelist Naomi Mitchison. It argues for Mitchison as one of the foremost twentieth-century practitioners of the historical novel as novel of ideas, focussing on The Bull Calves (1947), which she wrote during the Second World War, and which drew on her own family history as well as the wider history of Scotland’s complicated political status in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising. Mitchison’s most important contribution to the twentieth-century novel of ideas, the chapter concludes, was to forge a new kind of historical fiction which took seriously the dialectical relationship between conceptual and linguistic change.

This afterword considers the contribution made by the collection as a whole. It provides a frame for thinking of the 1830s as an ongoing phenomenon, looking at its influence in historical fiction set in the 1830s from George Eliot to Amitav Ghosh and the ways in which literary critics have attempted to understand the varied activity of the decade.

In the novel The Old and the Young, as well in many of his short stories, Pirandello, like Nietzsche, aims at undermining humankind’s faith in history. Life and world events are ruled by chance, according to Pirandello; since history is a fictional creation dependent on the ideology and feelings of the historian, writing it makes no sense. This is why one character in the short story “Interviews with Characters” tells the writer to concentrate instead on what really counts, the joy and suffering of even one real individual with whom readers can identify. This approach can be seen in the stories written with World War I as their backdrop: In one, for instance, Pirandello’s own anguish about his sons going off to fight is mirrored in the story of Marco Leccio, who must witness his sons’ departure for a conflict he thinks should be fought by the fathers as the completion of Italian unification because it was for his generation, not his sons’, that Austrians were enemies. Perhaps this skepticism about history’s ability to teach us anything was what made Pirandello deaf to the dangers of Fascism.

This essay looks at works by the Booker Prize-winning authors Peter Carey and Richard Flanagan, with reference to other internationally acclaimed Australian writers including Kate Grenville and Alexis Wright, to consider the ambiguous position of Australian literature in the evolving discourse of the Global South. Despite its emphatically southern location, Australia is usually classified as part of the Global North, based on various economic measures, and with the shift away from postcolonialism to a decolonial understanding of invasion as ‘a structure, not an event’ in settler societies, critics increasingly question whether writers of Australia’s white settler majority are ‘writing back’ to a dominant culture or writing from within one. Yet numerous critics have found it difficult to dissociate the land ‘down under’ from underdog status, and some identify Carey and Flanagan as writers of the Global South. They are aided in this by the historical settings of these authors’ best-known novels, which foreground past hardships endured by groups whose present-day descendants are typically much better placed. Ultimately, rather than seeking to place the Australian novel in relation to the Global South, this essay finds ‘the Global South’ and ‘the Australian novel’ to be mutually destabilising terms.

Expatriate women writers Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead produced field-defining novels of transnational scale and aesthetic ambition that engaged both the matter of Australia and the locations from which they produced and circulated their writing. For Richardson, the provocations of the ‘modern breakthrough’ in Scandinavian literature were central to her work with the realist novel. Stead’s girlhood saturation in gothic fairy-tales, the French novel and the Australian tradition expanded into restless experiments with the novel in the avant-garde circles of Paris (1929–34), before her negotiation of literary debates in France, England and America. The narrative strand of Kunstlerroman in Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–29) and Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children (1940) introduces the developing provincial subject as crucial to the vision of familial and national development, principally in the relation between child and parents. Stead and Richardson produced groundbreaking versions of the Kunstlerroman narrative, disrupting a stable nineteenth-century structure centred on stories about young artistic men. These women writers produced narratives of talented colonial subjects – young colonial children and provincial teenage daughters – situated outside these structures of power, and foregrounded their disruptive perceptions of flawed patriarchal-imperial modes of authority.

The chapter continues the emphasis on color and considers its relationship to temporal settings. As James F. English has shown, popular and prestigious fiction have diverged over the last half century, with the latter effecting a historical turn. Section 3.1 establishes a similar development for graphic novels, yet in contrast to contemporary novels, this historical turn remains limited to the subgenres of the graphic memoir and graphic journalism. Section 3.2 turns to Giorgio Agamben’s conception of the contemporary as a historicizing account of the present and looks at graphic novels that span past, present, and future settings. Where a focus on historical settings highlights a shift towards graphic nonfiction, the discussion of combined temporal settings argues for the continued vitality of popular subgenres within the graphic novel. Section 3.3 examines the evolving relationship between color printing and temporal settings.

This chapter describes the building, interior design, and furnishings in the location where the murders took place, drawing from a nineteenth-century historical novel about the crime.