On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays

As novelists become increasingly interested in history as fiction and fiction as history, this study is designed to redraw the map of the boundaries of modern fiction. In her opening essays - Fathers, Forefathers and Ancestors - the author considers the renaissance of the historical novel. She discusses in particular the novel of wartime experience; the surprising variety of distant pasts that British writers have invented; and the new Darwinian novel, stimulated in part by the discovery of DNA. These afford new readings of writers from Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green to Anthony Burgess, William Golding and Muriel Spark, and other contemporary authors, including Penelope Fitzgerald, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, John Fuller, Hilary Mantel and Pat Barker.