Georg Lukács (Lukács György), the famed Hungarian philosopher and literary critic, argued in his landmark 1937 work The Historical Novel that
[i]t was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass experience.... Hence the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them.
John McWilliams, in a recent essay that acknowledges the influence of Lukacs' interpretation of the development of the historical novel, observes that
Lukacs's insight [is] not only...a convincing explanation for the rise of the historical novel, but [is] a means of understanding why, since 1815, history has so often been assumed to be linear rather than cyclical, national rather than universal, an outcome of contending forces rather than the designs of individuals.
Irrespective of the extent to which one subscribes to such theory (and McWilliams actually argues against it in a close critical reading of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy and Lionel Lincoln), it is a fact that the first great wave of historical novels after Sir Walter Scott often were tinged with romantic nationalism, a setting in which the state derives its political legitimacy "as an organic consequence of the unity of those it governs." Among such works were Honoré de Balzac's Le Dernier Chouan (1829, revised several times and published under several titles, and the first of Balzac's novels to be incorporated into his magnum opus, La Comedie Humaine); Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris (1831, known better as The Hunchback of Notre Dame) and Aleksandr Pushkin's Kapitanskaya Dochka (The Captain's Daughter, 1836):
Similar works followed as historical fiction developed an international following: Leo Tolstoy's Voyna i Mir (War and Peace, 1869, a perennial candidate for Best Novel Ever Written); the prolific author Józef Ignacy Kraszewski's 29-volumes of fictionalized Polish history that commenced with Stara Baśń (1876) and ended with the posthumously-published Saskie Ostatki (1889); Norwegian Nobel Laureate Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter triology:
Such works of historical fiction bear little resemblance to the more formulaic titles that tend to dominate the modern marketplace for this genre. But that does not mean that all or even most early historical fiction was literary rather than formulaic, a distinction we shall consider in more detail in tomorrow's post....
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