[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 Russell
Banks’s
Cloudsplitter (1998).
I’ll admit
it, for a long time I hated Banks’ novel; not because of anything really about
it, but because my fallback plan had always been to write a historical novel
about John Brown from the point of view of one of his sons, and then Banks went
ahead and did that and did it amazingly well. But you can only hold onto your
hate for so long before you realize that an amazing historical novel about
fathers and sons, family and nation, violence and spirituality, the coming of
the Civil War, and heroism and villainy in American identity is worth
celebrating. Even if it did crush your dreams a bit.
Next historical fiction
tomorrow,
Benc
PS. What do you
think? Other historical fictions or authors you’d highlight?
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