Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions

Description

Remaking History considers the ways that historical fictions of all kinds enable a complex engagement with the past. Popular historical texts including films, television and novels, along with cultural phenomena such as superheroes and vampires, broker relationships to ‘history’, while also enabling audiences to understand the ways in which the past is written, structured and ordered. Jerome de Groot uses examples from contemporary popular culture to show the relationship between fiction and history in two key ways. Firstly, the texts pedagogically contribute to the historical imaginary and secondly they allow reflection upon how the past is constructed as ‘history’. In doing so, they provide an accessible and engaging means to critique, conceptualize and reject the processes of historical representation. The book looks at the use of the past in fiction from sources including Mad Men, Downton Abbey and Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn, along with the work of directors such as Terence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, to show that fictional representations enable a comprehension of the fundamental strangeness of the past and the ways in which this foreign, exotic other is constructed. Drawing from popular films, novels and TV series of recent years, and engaging with key thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Remaking History is a must for all students interested in the meaning that history has for fiction, and vice versa. Cover Title Copyright Dedication CONTENTS FIGURES Acknowledgements Permissions Introduction: Perverting history Part I: Ethics, politics, and nationalism 1 Reading and ethics Trusting the historical novel Wolf Hall and the ‘double effect’ of historical fiction Historical fiction and ethics War, blood, guts: Combat and violence in mass-market novels 2 Challenging national histories Discussion and origins: Jimmy’s Hall Disrupting pioneer myths: The Western This Is England Mad Men and the illusions of History Part II: Haunting, ghostliness, and the undead 3 The materiality of the past Smoking, pastness, and memory in historical film and television Pursuing smoke Smoking in Mad Men Rings as things and non-things Remnants and mourning 4 The problem of time and the return of the dead Horrible history Shuffling into history: Zombies Humanness and temporality: The vampire Modern times Time and magic and narrative: Hugo Part III: Pleasure, affect, and performance 5 Pleasure and desire Enjoying popular history Downton Abbey, escapism, and passivity Costume and the self-conscious pleasure of the text Misery programming Laughing at the past Lost in Austen, the gaze, and the pleasures of the text Historical exploitation 6 Performance and affect The Red Riding Trilogy, smoke, ethics, and performance Anne Boleyn, drag history, and the body of the past Hunger: Authenticity and abjection Conclusions Index