[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 James
Michener’s
It’s fair
to say, using the categories for which I argued in Monday’s post, that
Michener’s best-selling historical epics are more period fiction than
historical fiction—he’s certainly most interested in human experiences and
relationships, rather than in thorny questions of American history per se. But
on the other hand, his novels are multi-period,
tracing centuries of community and identity in each of his focal places, and
that makes them both unique and in and of themselves historically grounded (and
researched) in every effective ways. Most any of those epics could have been my
focus here, but Hawaii was really his
first in this category, and exemplifies his talents and successes for sure.
Last historical fiction
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other historical fictions or authors you’d highlight?
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