The Postcolonial Historical Novel

"The Postcolonial Historical Novel" is the first systematic work to explore how the historical novel shapes understandings of the past in former colonies, and how it has been transformed by its appropriation in these settings. Focusing on contemporary writing from Africa and Australasia, this book challenges conventional understandings of literary realism. It shows how plausibility and verifiability are fundamental to fiction-writing in places where the past is contested, and suggests new ways for thinking about the relations between historical truth and creative imagination. By analyzing how this commitment to realism and plausibility functions differently in texts from Nigeria, Australia, and New Zealand, this book explores how the historical novel has been inflected by distinct postcolonial pressures. In particular, it outlines three key variations or subgenres: settler allegory (which reflects the ideological tensions implicit in much colonial writing), transnational realism (which emerges from authors' desires to explore processes of globalization in their fiction), and melancholy realism (in which the boundaries between past and present dissolve).