historical novel

Genre of fictional prose narrative set in the past. Literature set in the historic rather than the immediate past has always abounded, but in the West, English writer Walter Scott began the modern tradition by setting imaginative romances of love, impersonation, and betrayal in a past based on known fact; his use of historical detail, and subsequent imitations of this technique by European writers, gave rise to the genre.

Some historical novels of the 19th century were overtly nationalistic, but most were merely novels set in the past to heighten melodrama while providing an informative framework; the genre was used by Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni, French Victor Hugo, English Charles Dickens, and US writer James Fenimore Cooper, among many others. In the 20th century the historical novel also became concerned with exploring psychological states and the question of differences in outlook and mentality in past periods. Examples of this are English writer Robert Graves's novels about the Roman emperor I, Claudius and Claudius the God (both 1934), and French writer Marguerite Yourcenar's Les Mémoires d'Hadrien/Memoirs of Hadrian (1951).

The less serious possibilities of the historical novel were exploited in the early 20th century in the form of the historical romance by US writers including Kenneth Roberts and James Michener, and the English Jeffery Farnol, Stanley Weyman, and Rafael Sabatini; English writers Dorothy Dunnett and George MacDonald Fraser revived the historical romance with some success in the late 1960s. Sub-genres of the historical novel developed, with their own conventions. Examples include the Western, many of which draw on US writer Owen Wister's classic The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902); and the novels of the South in the period of the Civil War, notably US writer Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936). In the late 20th century, generational series of novels about families, often industrialists of the early 19th century, became popular.