Welcome to Plagues, Witches, and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction. In this first video, I'm going to give you a sense of the course as a whole. How it's designed and organized, how it will unfold, and so on. I want to get you oriented briefly on the subject of the class, as well as the class itself. And then in the next video I'll talk more specifically about the requirements, and about how to get the most out of the course. How to approach the balance of readings, assignments, participation, and so on. So, let's begin, with a definition. What is historical fiction? Maybe the simplest way to understand historical fiction is, any story set in a distant past. Now, this could include almost anything. Epics like The Iliad and The Odyssey, Greek mythology, stories from the Bible, medieval romance, and so on. Any story that takes place in a time that's at least somewhat historically distant from the present of the narrator. For the purposes of this course, we need a more useful and focused definition, and here's the one I'm proposing. Historical fiction is a genre of imaginative narratives set in the past, whose authors make a deliberate effort to convey chronologically remote settings, cultures and personages with accuracy, plausibility, and depth. Now like any definition, that's an easy one to pick apart. And I'll start doing that in a later lecture. But it serves our purposes pretty well, though we'll have to modify it as we go along. And as we'll see, virtually every writer of historical fiction, has his or her own working definition of what constitutes the genre. And every work of historical fiction makes a specific claim about the importance of the particular moment from the past it chooses to bring to life. This swath of time, among all other swaths of time, is something we need to value, and plot, remember. So our collective understanding of historical fiction will be very much a work in progress as this course proceeds. Every time we read a new work, or listen to one of our visiting writers and scholars. We'll need to shift our comprehension of historical fiction to accommodate the wide diversity of claims and counter claims about its definition and its nature. And those differences I think are a good thing. They're a part of what I hope will make this course a provocative and challenging one for those of you who are interested in this genre as I very much am Now the course is organized into two main parts. And those two main parts are further broken down into a number of different sections. So let me talk about those for a moment. The first main part of the course will be units one and three. These will be mostly me lecturing to you about various aspects of historical fiction. We'll begin with some questions about method and genre. I'll talk to you about how we define historical fiction, give you some ways of thinking about the complexity of the genre, as it's changed over time. Then we'll think about the pre-history of historical fiction. What did historical fiction look like in the age before the historical novel, for example. We'll go all the way back to the Greeks to start answering that question, and I'll talk as well about prose fiction in the Renaissance. I'll then pose the question of the origin of the historical novel. By looking at two important works in the genre. Sophia Lee's, The Recess, published in 1783, set during the reign of Elizabeth the 1st in the 16th century. A very influential work in the rise of the gothic novel. And Sir Walter Scott's Waverley. A work set largely in Scotland during the Jacobite uprising in the 18th century. And a book that used to be described as the first historical novel. And I'll talk about some of the controversies around that label in a later lecture. Then, in the last lecture of unit one, I'll consider historical fiction as a global genre, from Sub-Saharan Africa to the 19th century Americas. While this course will mostly be covering the Anglo-American tradition, I'm hoping we can work together in the discussion forums to think about the transnational dimensions of the historical novel. And then go help your fellow students, and help me identify works from your home countries or regions that might be unknown in other parts of the world. Unit three of the course will examine some of the more interesting and important examples of historical fiction of the 19th and early 20th centuries. We'll look at James Fenimore Cooper's, Leatherstocking Tales, an epic sequence of historical novels that explore the world of the American frontier in the 18th century. In this unit, we'll also be reading William Wells Brown's Clotel, or The President's Daughter, regarded as the first novel in the African-American literary tradition. Among other things, Clotel explores Thomas Jefferson's relationship with his slave, Sally Hemmings, and its implications for the politics of race in antebellum America. I'll also have a lecture on A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickins' masterful account of the French Revolution, as it effects the lives of people in London and Paris. And fans of mystery writing will be happy to know that we're going to consider the beginning of the historical mystery in the 19th century. And here our text will be Anna Katharine Green's The Forsaken Inn. It's a virtually forgotten book published in 1889 that tells a haunting tale set in a country inn over the final decades of the 18th Century. I'll be in the University of Virginia's Special Collections Library for that lecture, and I'll show you an early edition of the Forsaken Inn. Historical fiction also had an important, if problematic, role in literary modernism, a topic I'll explore through Virginia Woolf's Orlando, set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First, and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! A modernist novel set before, during, and after the American Civil War. I'll also touch on the popularization of historical fiction in the period between the world wars. Here you might think of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, set during the Civil War and reconstruction, or Robert Graves's fiction of ancient Rome, I, Claudius, published in 1934, set during the reign of the Emperor Claudius. And unit three will end with a discussion of the new historical novel in Latin America. And I'll be joined by my colleague in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Gustavo Padron, a prominent scholar and translator of historical fiction of modern Latin America. These works are the tip of a very large iceberg. If we think of just a few other major 19th century novels we won't be covering in this class, you'll get a sense of how narrow and partial the perspective I'll be giving you inevitably is. Works like Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, published in 1869, but depicting the events of the Napoleonic Wars and the French invasion of Russia in 1805. Or Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, set in the Puritan Massachusetts colony two centuries before its publication in 1850. The novelist George Eliot is most famous for Middlemarch and Silas Marner, novels set in her own 19th century. But she also wrote a wonderful historical novel, Romola, set in Florence during the Italian renaissance. And this list goes on. Melville, Flaubert, Balzac, Dumas. This was the great age of historical fiction and it's difficult to think of a major 19th century novelist who didn't write at least one historical novel. Over the last few decades, historical fiction has only increased in popularity with works like Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series including Master and Commander. Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall which won the Man Booker prize a few years ago. And the work of best selling historical novelists like Ken Follett, Bernard Cornwell, and Philippa Gregory among others. This is to say nothing of the massive interest of today's readers of historical romances, historical thrillers, historical mysteries, and so on. So historical fiction is a huge, capacious genre, with all kinds of off-shoots. And an eight-week class can only cover so much. So I want you to know from the beginning that I'm painfully aware of how much I could be covering in this class. And while the choices I've made of what to cover aren't arbitrary by any means, they are highly selective, and you should go in knowing that they reflect my biases, my particular tastes, and my own blind spots. Almost all of the novels I'll be lecturing on are available free and in full online. I'll provide links to them in the Readings tab, give you some recommended chapters and pages, as well as a lot of supplemental reading for context and background in the lectures themselves. I'll be bringing out specific passages from the novels themselves and other works relating to sources, reception, criticism, and so on in the lectures. Now this is a class on literature, so what you'll see a lot of in my lectures is words. I'm going to be putting a lot of passages in front of you, and in front of me, as we go along. Reading them aloud so you can see those portions of text I'm talking about in the moment, without having to go back to the novel. Often, I'll put a quite long passage on the screen, pulling out notable words and phrases, showing you how the author is working with historical material or narrative voice at particular moments and so on. So that's the first major part of the course. The second major part of the course will feature five contemporary writers of historical fiction. Each of these authors will be holding a discussion with my students here on the grounds at the University of Virginia. These students are enrolled this fall in my senior seminar in the English department on historical fiction, and you'll see them interacting actively with our visitors. Our visiting novelists will be sharing with us their approach to the mysterious craft of historical fiction, which can seem like a kind of literary alchemy. They'll talk about how they use archival sources, how they recreate historical characters, how they put together dialogue and settings, and more generally, how as writers, they bring the past to life. And I think you'll hear a lot of different takes on the nature of historical fiction as a genre, and as a creative art. All of these writers will be bringing their own unique perspectives with them into our class, and into its discussions. So let me introduce our visiting novelists to you in alphabetical order. First, Jane Alison, Professor of Creative Writing here at the University of Virginia. She's the author of three novels including, The Marriage of the Sea, which was a New York Times notable book for 2003 as well as a recent memoir, The Sisters Antipities. We'll be reading from her first novel, The Love Artist featuring the poet Ovid and his mysterious exile from Rome to the shores of the Black Sea. Next Geraldine Brooks. She's an internationally bestselling novelist, whose works have been translated into dozens of languages. She received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006, for her novel, March. She'll be visiting our class to discuss Year of Wonders, which recreates a mountain village beset by plague in 17th century England. Yangsze Choo is the debut author of The Ghost Bride, identified as a selection in Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers Series for Fall 2013. The novel is set in colonial Malaysia in the 1890s. And it explores the Chinese tradition of spiritual marriage through the eyes of a young woman haunted by the ghost of her perspective husband. Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling novelist, as well as a scholar and teacher of American culture. She'll join us to discuss the Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, which tells a trans-historical tale of witchcraft, magic, and persecution, from the 17th century to the present. And finally Mary Beth Keane, who received her MFA from Th University of Virginia, and in 2011 was named one of the five under 25 by the National Book Foundation. We'll be reading from her novel Fever, which retells the story of typhoid Mary, an Irish immigrant living in New York, who has identified as the first immune carrier of typhoid fever in America. I'll be providing you with links to all five of these novels, as well as some historical materials for context. These seminars will be pre-recorded but we'll also have a number of opportunities for real-time interactions with our guests. Chats on the forums, a Twitter stream, perhaps some Google Hangouts. I'm honored that these contemporary writers have offered their time and their energy to this course, and I hope you'll find their visits an engaging dimension of our class as it progresses. Finally, aside from our five visiting novelists, I'll be holding a series of author conversations with a number of novelists and scholars over these next eight weeks. Including Matthew Pearl and Andrew Taylor, two internationally best selling writers of historical fiction. And Michael McKeon, one of the world's leading scholars of the history of the novel. As well as several others. I'll be recording these conversations on Skype, and then I'll post them along with the lectures and seminar videos as we go along. Now, if you use Skype, you'll know that connections can sometime be pretty spotty. And you'll notice that these conversations are a bit rough and ready. They're split screen, sometimes a bit fuzzy. Not the polished videos that you'll be seeing in lectures and seminars. So, I want you to think of them as a more informal supplement to the other components of the course. But they will give us an even broader sense of the diverse lives of historical fiction, within and beyond the academy. And I hope you'll enjoy this aspect of the course as much as I've already enjoyed putting it together. So, that's Plagues, Witches and War in a nutshell. I'm excited to have this opportunity to teach historical fiction to such a diverse group of students from around the world. And please don't hesitate to post any questions or concerns in the forums as they arise. The next lecture is about the assignments, and about how you can get the most out of this class. So I encourage you to view that shorter video when you have a few minutes. I hope you enjoy the course.
