[Last week, I
began teaching my graduate
American Historical Fiction: Practice and Theory class for the fourth time,
this time as a hybrid course. So this week I’ll briefly highlight (busy with
teaching and all) a handful of exemplary historical fictions and related contexts.
Share your own favorite historical fictions or authors for a boundary-blurring
crowd-sourced weekend post, please!]
Today’s
nominee for an amazing American historical novel is Octavia Butler’s
Kindred (1979).
The
premise of Butler’s science fiction historical novel is simple enough: a 1970s
African American woman suddenly finds herself time traveling back into the
antebellum South, where she becomes (or rather, is) a slave. But without
spoiling the many amazing places where Butler takes her story from there, I’ll
just say that she is centrally concerned with some of the most genuinely
historical and American themes: family and legacies, race and its continuous
yet shifting presence and meanings, love and hope and hatred and death,
community and identity in our past, present, and (it
is science fiction after all!) future. One of our most unique, significant,
and compelling American novels, historical or otherwise.
Next historical fiction
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other historical fictions or authors you’d highlight?
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