Time Period
Time scales in historical novels vary widely. While many focus on a particular event or series of events, writers like James A. Michener and Edward Rutherfurd employ generations of fictional characters to tell tales that stretch for hundreds or thousands of years. Others, like McCullough and Gore Vidal, compose a chronological series of linked novels.
Some writers postulate an alternative to accepted historical presumptions. In I, Claudius, by 20th-century writer Robert Graves, the Roman Emperor Claudius, until then commonly regarded as inept by historians, is presented in a more sympathetic light. Mary Renault's novels of ancient Greece, such as The Last of the Wine, implied suggestions of tolerance for homosexuality. Gore Vidal's novels about American history, including Burr and 1876, included iconoclastic and cynical insights about the nature of political processes and American history. Historical fiction can also serve satirical purposes. An example is George MacDonald Fraser's tales of the dashing cad, poltroon, and bounder Sir Harry Paget Flashman.
Read more about this topic: Historical Novel
Famous quotes containing the words time and/or period:
“Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)