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There is general agreement that the story of the modern historical novel begins with the Waverly novels of Sir Walter Scott. Set in Scotland in the aftermath of the failed Rising of 1745, the novels established the form of the historical novel and demonstrated its potential for commercial success. Scott remained a best-selling author in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. As late as the 1960s, Ivanhoe was still a required text in American high schools, as the author can attest from personal experience. In the wake of Scott's American vogue, native authors—notably James Fennimore Cooper—became best-selling historical novelists in their own right. Cooper's The Spy (1821), a novel about the American Revolution, launched his career, and in subsequent works his settings included New England during King Philip's War and the Michigan frontier, but he is still best remembered for his five Leather stocking novels, which took as their subject the frontier, Westward expansion, and the clash of "civilization and savagery." During the 1820s, Cooper was joined by numerous other writers, now largely forgotten, who turned their attention to the nation's New England roots in the aftermath of the War of 1812. Historical novels were one important manifestation of literary nationalism throughout the antebellum period. With the first historical novelists came the first distinguished American historians, George Bancroft and William Hickling Prescott.

From its beginnings in the 1820s, the popularity of historical fiction has ebbed and flowed to the present day—impelled to varying degrees by the questions about national origins and identity that stimulated Cooper and his contemporaries. Another impetus for historical fiction has been regionalism. Southern writers turned to their region's history, beginning in the 1830s with works by William A. Caruthers (The Cavaliers of Virginia, 1834, for example), or the prolific William Gilmore Simrns (Guy Rivers, 1834; The Yemassee and The Partisan, both 1835, etc.). The emergence of regionalism as a self-conscious literary movement in the 1880s and 1890s encouraged historical fiction about other regions as well: Edward Eggleston's The Circuit Rider (1874), set in Indiana, or Harold Frederic's In the Valley (1890), set in New York's Mohawk Valley during the French and Indian War.

Popular interest in historical fiction after 1820 drew on other sources than patriotism and regional loyalty, however. Like the travel literature for which there was a large readership in the nineteenth century, historical novels were a "cheap ticket" to exotic lands and times; Cooper's The Bravo (1831), set in eighteenth-century Venice, is an early example, and Mary Hartwell Catherwood's The Romance of Dollard (1888), set in France's New World colonies, is a later example of popular historical fiction with foreign settings. The Civil War, like the Revolution and the frontier, gave historical novelists a subject of inexhaustible interest, tapping powerful and persistent regional loyalties as well as questions about national purpose, destiny, and identity. Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a canonical work of American literature; it is also an historical novel, and distinguished works about the Civil War continue to be written, for example, Charles Frazier's acclaimed Cold Mountain (1998).

In the later nineteenth century, historical fiction enjoyed one of its periods of conspicuous popularity, driven, some have argued, by readers seeking escape from the uncertainty and economic distress of the 1880s and 1890s. Historical fiction could provide temporary respite in difficult times. In addition to economic uncertainty, the late nineteenth century witnessed a crisis of faith as biblical criticism and science, especially Darwinian evolutionism, increasingly challenged traditional religious teachings and the authority of the Bible. Historical novels set in biblical times drew large readerships in the wake of the extraordinary success of Ben-Hur (1880), for example, Marie Corelli's Barrabbus and Florence Kinglsey's Titus: A Comrade of the Cross (both 1894). Enthusiasm for the biblical novel declined after the turn of the century, but it remained a staple of Christian publishing.

In the Depression years of the 1930s, literary criticism, newly professionalized and increasingly housed in the modern university, called on writers to address contemporary problems and attacked writers like Willa Cather who had turned increasingly to historical fiction. Readers, however, flocked to the historical novels of writers like the prolific Kenneth Roberts (e.g. Rabble in Arms [1933], Northwest Passage [1937]), and made Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936) the greatest best seller in American publishing history to that time. The work of Roberts and others reveals an increasing emphasis on historical research and a scrupulous regard for historical detail. Increasingly, historical fiction could be defended as conveying genuine knowledge about the past—in addition to telling a good story.

The centennial of the Civil War and the bicentennial of the nation's birth in the Revolutionary War stimulated the production of historical fiction in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s. John Jakes, for example, achieved enormous popularity with The Kent Family Chronicles, an eight-volume family saga that sold tens of millions of copies and was adapted to television. Distinguished works of historical fiction also found a wide audience at this time, including Gore Vidal's Lincoln (1984); William Styron's controversial The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967); Jane Gilmore Rushing's Covenant of Grace (1982), based on the life of Anne Hutchinson; and Mary Lee Settle's Blood Tie (1978), for which she won the National Book Award.

During the last twenty years, historical fiction has received enormous impetus from "multiculturalism," which has focused attention on the marginalized, the neglected, and the historically voiceless. In addition, the legitimacy of historical fiction has been enhanced by the powerful attack mounted from within the historical profession itself on the possibility of objective historical knowledge, on the one hand, and by a newfound interest among philosophers, sociologists, and historians themselves in the techniques of narration—the novelist's stock in trade—on the other. The Roots phenomenon and the embrace of narrative as a form of knowledge are international in scope, affecting the writing of historical fiction throughout the Anglo-American world and beyond. At no time in the history of historical fiction has its cognitive potential been greater than at present. Thus it is possible for a novel, Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996), to be called "a compelling work of history" and for an historian of the stature of John Demos to undertake a novel, The Unredeemed Captive (1994). Historically distinguished novels published more recently include Brian Hall, / Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company (2003); Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe 's Havoc (2003); Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001); Tariq Ali, The Stone Woman (2001); Louise Erdrich, The Master Butcher's Singing Club (2002); Howard Bahr, The Year ofJubilo (2000); Patrick O'Brian, Blue at the Mizzen (1999); and Lalita Tademy, Cane River (2002).

References:

1. Atwood, Margaret. "In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction." American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (December 1998): 1503-16.

2. Kelly, R. Gordon. "Some Readers Reading." In Mystery Fiction and Modern Life (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998); "Historical Fiction." In Handbook of American Popular Literature, ed. M. Thomas Inge (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), 175-96; "Josephine Tey and Others: The Case of Richard III." In The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction, ed. Ray B. Browne and Laurence A Kreiser Jr. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 2000), 133^6.

3. Long, Elizabeth. "Women, Reading, and Cultural Authority: Some Implications of the Audience Perspective in Cultural Studies." American Quarterly 38 (fall 1986): 591-612.

4. Mallon, Thomas. "Writing Historical Fiction." American Scholar 61 (autumn 1992): 604-10.

5. Michener, James. "Historical Fiction." American Heritage 33, no. 3 (April/May 1982): 44-48.

6. Peabody, Sue. "Reading and Writing Historical Fiction." Iowa Journal of Literary Studies (1989): 29-39.

7. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

8. Turner, Joseph W. "The Kinds of Historical Fiction: An Essay in Definition and Methodology." Genre 12 (fall 1979): 333-55.

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