Literature for African Students

Fiction - The Novel (genres)

3. Historical Fiction A novel set in the past is different from the Science Fiction novel which is often set in the future. The past, or some of it, is known. In this genre the writer must mix what is known with what he imagines. Since not everything about the past is known it is possible to invent characters and incidents. The skillful writer will make up characters who are like those who might have existed - plausible# ,   plausible - something that we can believe in easily and not think is impossible, at least within the story. they might be called. Less accurate novelists put in people who behave and speak as though they lived in our time. Thus the reader gets the wrong picture of the past. Such characters may be called anachronistic - out of time. It is possible to write a historical novel in which everything is imagined. Ursula le Guin's Malafrena is about an imaginary Central European country called Orsinia. She sets the novel in the period up to the 1830 revolution in France which led to the national uprisings in such countries as Hungary, Serbia and Greece. The fictional country is an amalgam of the features of Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other small countries which were on the fringe of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - the area between Russia and Germany which was dominated by the Soviet Union following the Second World War until 1990. Occasionally real historical characters such as Metternich, the Foreign Minister of the Austrian Empire, are mentioned. The novel allows the author to illustrate or present to the reader the feelings of people in a small country trying to break free of a great empire. The most difficult task for a historical novelist is to choose suitable language. Language changes with time. A novel set in the last century should not use English expressions which were only introduced in this century. These would be anachronistic. But language selection can be overdone. Georgette Heyer has written a number of historical novels, of non-literary quality, set in the early years of the nineteenth century (the Regency period) which use so many phrases of the time inserted in a rather mechanical fashion that they are tedious to read. (Film makers sometimes have the problem of anachronism. Occasionally in a film set in the remote past an actor can be seen wearing a digital watch.) What if the novel is set in the Roman Empire where the people spoke Latin and Greek? Robert Graves, who as well as being a poet and a scholar of Latin and Greek wrote several influential historical novels good enough to be considered as literature, tackled this problem by trying to write English in the same style as the Latin and Greek of his characters. His historical novels include: I, Claudius; Claudius the God; Count Belisarius and several others.

A good historical novelist will try to make the novel accurate as history and will try not to include anything which could not have happened, as far as students of history know. Of course the imaginative writer can use history as a background for fantasy. The best known African novelist who has written historical fiction is Chinua Achebe with Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Other well-known writers are Alfred Duggan, Mary Renault with The Bull from the Sea. George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series is a well researched series of books on 19th century history told around a fictional character taken from the famous book of 19th century school life - Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes. The first historical novels may have been those by Walter Scott, a Scottish writer, about Scottish history. 4. Romantic Fiction This genre is aimed mainly at women in Britain and America and concentrates on love and marriage - mainly on men and women meeting and falling in love. Like most popular fiction there is a lot of fantasy in this genre. The stories are generally not like real life. The readers are often women who don't have a very interesting life at home, looking after the house and the children or doing uninteresting work. Many women perhaps wish they had married more interesting husbands, or had a more interesting life. Books of this kind may encourage them to escape into a fantasy world rather than try to do something about themselves and their problems. Some books in this genre are quite well-written but most are written quickly, almost as though they were being produced in a factory. The plots are nearly all the same and the characterisations are usually stereotyped and undeveloped at more than a superficial level. They were satirised#   Satire - the art of using language to make people think about something while laughing at it. For example, a politician with strange ideas might have sketches (short comic plays) made about him on television. by George Orwell in 1984 as "Prolefeed" - books for the uneducated to keep them quiet - but he lived before television became important. In most countries nowadays television is used for this purpose. But books are a form of entertainment and so long as we don't try to study them as literature this genre may well have its place in society. In a free society people can read whatever they like.

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