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:
“My time has been passed viciously and agreeably; at thirty-one so few years months days hours or minutes remain that “Carpe Diem” is not enough. I have been obliged to crop even the seconds—for who can trust to tomorrow?”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are the “best men,” as the Algonquins called them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)