Today our lectures tackled the difficult question of whether the success of historical fiction benefits or threatens academic history. Jackie Eales, Cora Kaplan, Paul Lay, and Stella Tillyard all tackled this question in their own unique ways. Throughout the conference it has been stated and questioned as to whether historical authenticity and accuracy matters – does it really make a good historical novel. Tillyard argues that what makes a good novel is the novelist not its authenticity. This is a point definitely worthy of more discussion.
Paul Lay answers the question by looking at the role of empathy and myth. Cora Kaplan brings up a suggestion of a politics of the novel and Jackie Eales looks at how historians use and control their sources – worryingly perhaps for the historian she concludes that historians treatment of source material does not necessarily differ that much from a novelist.
In addition we’ve received book reviews starting from the Romans with Robert Harris’ Pompeii, through to the reformation in the sixteenth century with a book about John Bale. Tracey S. Rosenberg also treats us to a behind the scenes look at how she wrote her book The Girl in the Bunker (thus bringing our historical coverage up to the twentieth century).
Don’t forget our competition. So far entries are rather light so the prizes are all to play for. Remember you could win £25 in Amazon vouchers or a year’s subscription to the Historical Research journal.
Today we also announced our intention to run a workshop about using historical research for writing novels. There are plenty of creative writing courses available but we feel we can offer something different – skills training that will enable you to carry out the research which this conference has highlighted time and time again can make or break an historical novel. Please let us know if you are interested by commenting on that item.
Tomorrow we end the active phase of this conference (at least from our end) with audio from the roundtable of speakers, various book reviews and articles and the announcement of our competition winners.
So stay tuned and please do keep on commenting and discussing!
Novel approaches 