Constructing a World: Shakespeare's England and the New Historical Fiction

by Martha Tuck Rozett

Overview

Examines recent developments in historical fiction, with particular attention to the way contemporary writers have portrayed Shakespearean England.

Taking its title from Umberto Eco's postscript to The Name of the Rose, the novel that inaugurated the New Historical Fiction in the early 1980s, Constructing the World provides a guide to the genre's defining characteristics. It also serves as a lively account of the way Shakespeare, Marlowe, Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth I, and their contemporaries have been depicted by such writers as Anthony Burgess, George Garrett, Patricia Finney, Barry Unsworth, and Rosalind Miles. Innovative historical novels written during the past two or three decades have transformed the genre, producing some extraordinary bestsellers as well as less widely read serious fiction. Shakespearean scholar Martha Tuck Rozett engages in an ongoing conversation about the genre of historical fiction, drawing attention to the metacommentary contained in "Afterwords" or "Historical Notes"; the imaginative reconstruction of the diction and mentality of the past; the way Shakespearean phrases, names, and themes are appropriated; and the counterfactual scenarios writers invent as they reinvent the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791487730
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	02/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	423 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Martha Tuck Rozett is Professor of English at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Talking Back to Shakespeare and The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments


1. Introduction: Historical Fiction Old and New


2. Of Narrators; or How the Teller Tells the Tale


3. Historical Novelists at Work: George Garrett and Anthony Burgess


4. Barry Unsworth's Morality Play and the Origins of English Secular Drama


5. Fictional Queen Elizabeths and Women-Centered Historical Fiction


6. Rewriting Shakespeare: The Henriad with and without Falstaff


7. Teaching Shakespeare's England through Historical Fiction


Notes


Works Cited


Index

What People are Saying About This

George Garrett

Martha Tuck Rozett gracefully handles a great deal of material with economy and precision, at once rehearsing traditional views of the subject while also offering an adventurous review of the contemporary scene. Though the subject of historical fiction has been a topic of interest for many years, no one to my knowledge has managed to deal so effectively as Rozett does with the postmodern development of what she calls the New Historical Fiction.
— author of Death of The Fox