Okay.
This is the first in a series of dialogues on historical
fiction that I'll be posting over the course of our class.
Plagues, witches, and war.
These are very informal conversations, chats really, with a number of
scholars and authors of historical fiction about various aspects of the genre.
Now these are very informal very rough and ready
videos, I recorded them for the most part on Skype.
I'm sitting in my living room right now with my dog behind me.
so, you'll, you'll want to think about these
dialogs in a different way than you do
about the formal lectures and seminars that we've
presented as a core part of the class.
I'm not associating any assigned reading with these
dialogues, so think about them in that spirit.
I have linked to books by all of the scholars
and authors that I'll be talking to in these dialogues.
But again, that's just a supplemental part of the course I'm not assigning any
readings to go along with these dialogues.
My first guest for these, is Michael McKeon.
He is professor of literature at Rutgers University He's one of
the world's leading experts on the history and theory of the novel.
He's the author of a number of very, very influential and well
regarded works on this subject, including The Origins of the English Novel.
he's also the editor of an influential anthology called Theory of the Novel.
In this conversation
we talk about what it meant to be historical in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
During this age, when historical fiction really came of age in
the historical novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
we talk a little bit about the categories of history and fiction and
what those meant to the earliest readerships
of historical fiction in the English language.
and we also talk a little bit
about an influential theorist of the historical novel,
who wrote a lot about Sir Walter Scott.
Named Lukács, and I've linked to Lukács's work on
the historical novel in the readings tab under unit one.
so I give you Michael McKeon.
Hello MIchael and thanks so much for joining our conversation in this class.
>> Oh, you're quite welcome.
>> so you know, this is a class on historical fiction.
The historical novel, we're beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
And one thing that,
authors of that period seem self conscious about,
is, is what exactly it means to be historical.
To be writing historical fiction.
What, what did that mean in the eighteenth
century, and how did that, that notion change.
That, that idea of being historical. Yes.
Well, it's it's intimately connected with the emergence of the
novel as a genre in the eighteenth century and, to answer that I really
have to talk about two different stages in people's
thinking about what the novel has to do with history.