Introduction

Extract

Catherine Gallagher's importance as a scholar of nineteenth-century British culture and a historian and theorist of the novel makes the appearance of a new monograph by her an event for Victorianists (among others). This is true even when few of the materials she discusses are, strictly speaking, Victorian, as is the case with her new book, Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. In Telling It Like It Wasn't, Gallagher traces the emergence and development of analytic and narrative discourses premised on counterfactual-historical hypotheses. As the author explains, these hypotheses are past-tense, conditional conjectures “pursued when the antecedent condition is known to be contrary to fact,” such as, to take her two major examples, What if the South won the Civil War? and What if the Nazis had invaded Britain? Bringing together what Gallagher calls “counterfactual histories,” which are more analytical than narrative and typically consider multiple unrealized possibilities; works of “alternate history,” which describe one continuous sequence of departures from the historical record but draw their dramatis personae exclusively from that record; and “the alternate-history novel, [which] invents not only alternative-historical trajectories but also fictional characters,” Telling It Like It Wasn't explores the distinctive uses and dynamic interactions of these forms over the past two centuries and considers their implications for our understanding of more conventional fiction and historiography.