Routledge Remaking History: The Past in Contemporary Historical Fictions

Remaking History considers the ways that historical fictions of all kinds enable a complex engagement with the past. Popular historical texts including films, television and novels, along with cultural phenomena such as superheroes and vampires, broker relationships to ‘history’, while also enabling audiences to understand the ways in which the past is written, structured and ordered. Jerome de Groot uses examples from contemporary popular culture to show the relationship between fiction and history in two key ways. Firstly, the texts pedagogically contribute to the historical imaginary and secondly they allow reflection upon how the past is constructed as ‘history’. In doing so, they provide an accessible and engaging means to critique, conceptualize and reject the processes of historical representation. The book looks at the use of the past in fiction from sources including Mad Men, Downton Abbey and Howard Brenton’s Anne Boleyn, along with the work of directors such as Terence Malick, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, to show that fictional representations enable a comprehension of the fundamental strangeness of the past and the ways in which this foreign, exotic other is constructed. Drawing from popular films, novels and TV series of recent years, and engaging with key thinkers from Marx to Derrida, Remaking History is a must for all students interested in the meaning that history has for fiction, and vice versa. Review "Jerome De Groot, who in two previous volumes has done pioneering work on the impact of historical "fictions" on our sense and understanding of the past, carries his brilliant and expansive arguments into brave new realms, from that of Hilary Mantel, to TV’s Mad Men, to night worlds of popular vampire fictions. A must read for anyone interested in what the author rightly calls "new historic encounters, new modes of pastness, a new historicity."- Robert A Rosenstone, Professor Emeritus of History, California Institute of Technology, USA "Around the complex, deep entanglements of the historical and the fictional a rich body of commentary has gathered. Jerome de Groot's decisive contribution to this follows from the ambitiously diverse scope of his reference points and his sheer critical acuity in exploring the ways in which 'the past' is both produced by, and feeds, imaginings."- John Corner, University of Leeds, UK "In this wide-ranging study, De Groot (English, Univ. of Manchester, UK) argues that historical fiction has an "uncanny" relationship to the past; that is, it is a genre that makes history simultaneously familiar and alien.  Not confining his analysis to novels, De Groot also examines English-language film and television programs (Downton Abbey, Mad Men) to demonstrate how contemporary historical fiction is itself a form of historiography... this is an important contribution to historical fiction studies." - L. R. Braunstein, Dartmouth College, CHOICE Reviews