Global Historical Fictions

Defining historical fictions as encompassing of many media forms, this book series invites contributions that consider the multiple ways in which we shape history for diverse purposes, and that investigate popular history in a variety of contexts, and modes.

Historical fictions are booming - historical novels regularly feature on bestseller lists and are nominated for literary prizes. Films and TV dramas set in the past likewise enjoy growing prominence. Across a range of media, the past is increasingly perceived through imagining the unrecorded, by encountering re-imagined personalities and experiencing what it might have been like to be “there”. Popular history offers both recreation and re-creation. Therefore, fictional narratives and images often supersede scientific history in public consciousness, and support political claims, identities and agendas.

Emerging from the international and interdisciplinaryHistorical Fictions Research Network, the series has three overarching aims:

1) To explore the impact of popular fictional forms in the shaping of popular perceptions of the past.

2) To widen the range of media forms (particularly popular ones) that are recognised as crucial to the popular understanding of history.

3) Though studies focusing on individual nation literatures and cultural forms are encouraged, to draw attention to the importance of transnational or international popular histories and thus to challenge the Western dominance of the field.

For more information, please visit: https://brill.com/page/hifi