| This study examines the historical novel as a generic hybrid, simultaneously fiction and historiography, to fill in a missing chapter in the history of historiography, the history of the novel, and the history of realism. I begin by describing the major developments in eighteenth-century historiography: institutions such as the Society of Antiquaries, the fields of cultural and social history, and new methods for exploring the past. These features required new narrative forms, and eighteenth-century writers experimented with a number of ways to accommodate these changes, such as antiquarian collections, universal histories, and conjectural histories.;The remainder of my study concentrates on the historical novel as another of these forms, reflecting historiographic changes but bringing a different perspective to the past through its fictive nature. Chapter two surveys historical novels from 1762 to 1812 by Horace Walpole, Thomas Leland, Maria Edgeworth, William Godwin, Sydney Owenson, and others, to explore how the historical novel borrowed from historiography and provided solutions to historiographic dilemmas about typicality and objectivity.;In chapter three I examine Sophia Lee's The Recess (1783--85) in relation to her sources, William Robertson's History of Scotland (1759) and David Hume's History of Great Britain (1754--62). Lee's novel recasts their narratives as a sentimental epistolary novel, using first-person narration to generate sympathy for Mary, Queen of Scots through the fates of her imaginary daughters. At the same time, she draws upon the uncertainties of the historical record to create a space for her radical reimagining of the past. Chapter four focuses on Walter Scott, whose Waverley Novels helped to establish a particular model of historical fiction worldwide. With Ivanhoe, Scott meditates upon the content and purpose of cultural history in a way that would prove highly influential to his nineteenth-century followers.;The historical novel is perhaps the most important generic innovation of Romantic-era fiction and historiography. My examination of the first fifty years of the historical novel and its connections with historiography, as I suggest in the conclusion, has consequences not just for our understanding of the later development of the historical novel but also for Victorian realism and subsequent historiography. |
