So What Is Historical Fiction?

It’s a good question. Because, given enough time, all fiction gets to be historical. And that makes me rethink what I said last week about genre being a shelf in the bookstore. That’s not a bad start, but keeping the metaphor physical like that may limit our understanding of genre, we start thinking “one book, one shelf,” which leads bookstores to put Toni Morrison’s Beloved in African-American Literature, and nowhere else.

It may be that genre is a tag. It’s not that it has characteristics that make you put it on the historical fiction shelf as opposed to in general fiction. Instead, it has characteristics that allow you to put a sticker on it that says “Historical Fiction.” You can put a lot of other tags on it as well, but this one clearly belongs.

So what are the characteristics? I’ve heard some say that historical fiction is fiction written about a time before the author lived. But that isn’t quite right – that gets limiting. It excludes Phillip Roth’s Plot Against America, and Don DeLilo’s Libra, both of which I’d say are I’d say historical fiction, even though Phillip Roth has inserted his childhood self into one, and DeLilo clearly lived through the Kennedy assassination.

One of historical fiction’s weird strengths is that it is so broad. Basically, anything that happened in the past is the subject of historical fiction. But it seems silly to call John Updike writing about his boyhood “historical fiction,” no matter how long ago that was. Better example --- Shakespeare wrote a number of plays that are referred to as the Histories. Why? Because they were about British history, and the primary reason to watch them was to get an idea of who and what came before.)

So maybe historical fiction is simply fiction that is concerned with history. It’s not a great definition, but it serves my purposes for the time being. And I think, as I wind up looking at more of the problems and the techniques unique to historical fiction, I’ll be able to refine the definition.