The Emergence of a Meta-Genre: The Historical Novel and the Modernization of the Novel
Keywords:
literature and history, historical novel, 19th cent., modern novel, literary fiction, Bakhtin, MihailAbstract
The aim of the article is to situate the historical novel within the history of the novel. It is argued that the great pioneers of the historical novel in the 19th century are pivotal within a tendency that could be called “the modernization of the novel”. The 19th-century historical novels confirm the modernization tendency both on a semantic level and on a compositional level. They pay attention to the contingencies of everyday life as well as to the “open-ended” dialogical nature of the fictional world.References
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