Introduction

Summary

History, and science too, help us put our small lives in context. But if we want to meet the dead looking alive, we turn to art.

Hilary Mantel (2017a: 2)

The objective of this book is to analyse a group of novels which are situated at the intersection of two tendencies in contemporary fiction: the evolution of the historical novel and the rise of present-tense narration. Whereas both have received critical attention – although the former to a much greater extent than the latter – their combination has not been researched so far. Historical fiction written in the present tense is a new phenomenon, worth investigating for two major reasons. On the one hand, it is yet another manifestation of the contemporary historical novel's multifarious forays into new forms of telling the past. On the other hand, together with a significant proportion of the fiction published today, it constitutes a challenge to a long-established writing practice as well as to the narratological axiom that the past tense is the natural and mimetic tense in narrative. Consequently, the emphasis in this study has been placed on the formal aspects of the chosen historical fiction.

The comment that Kate Mitchell made about neo-Victorian fiction may be extended to encompass all the historical novels discussed in the present study:

these novels, while demonstrating a vivid awareness of the problematics involved in seeking and achieving historical knowledge, remain nonetheless committed to the possibility and the value of striving for that knowledge. They are more concerned with the ways in which fiction can lay claim to the past, provisionally and partially, rather than the ways that it can not. (2010: 3)

Although the marked choice of tense in the selected fiction draws attention to the issue of historical representation, it ultimately serves to make the past come alive in the present rather than foreground its elusiveness. Of What Is Passing: Present-Tense Narration in the Contemporary Historical Novel aims to reveal how the present tense helps to imaginatively reconstruct the past. This singular option regarding the temporality of narrative entails a number of strategies concerning the narrative structure and the choice of perspective, as well as specific questions of causality, coherence, teleology and narratorial reliability. These are going to be explored in detail in each novel.