1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910814349903321

Autore

Rozett Martha Tuck <1946->

Titolo

Constructing a world [[electronic resource] ] : Shakespeare's England and the new historical fiction / / Martha Tuck Rozett

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Albany, : SUNY Press, 2003

ISBN

0-7914-8773-3

1-4175-2399-9

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (217 p.)

Disciplina

823/.0810903

Soggetti

Historical fiction, English - History and criticism

American fiction - 20th century - History and criticism

English fiction - 20th century - History and criticism

Historical fiction, American - History and criticism

Great Britain History Elizabeth, 1558-1603 Historiography

England In literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-198) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front Matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Of Narrators; or How the Teller Tells the Tale -- Historical Novelists at Work -- Barry Unsworth’s Morality Play and the Origins of English Secular Drama -- Fictional Queen Elizabeths and Women-Centered Historical Fiction -- Rewriting Shakespeare -- Teaching Shakespeare’s England through Historical Fiction -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Taking its title from Umberto Eco's postscript to The Name of the Rose, the novel that inaugurated the New Historical Fiction in the early 1980s, Constructing the World provides a guide to the genre's defining characteristics. It also serves as a lively account of the way Shakespeare, Marlowe, Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth I, and their contemporaries have been depicted by such writers as Anthony Burgess, George Garrett, Patricia Finney, Barry Unsworth, and Rosalind Miles. Innovative historical novels written during the past two or three decades have transformed the genre, producing some extraordinary bestsellers as well as less widely read serious fiction. Shakespearean scholar Martha Tuck Rozett engages in an ongoing conversation about



the genre of historical fiction, drawing attention to the metacommentary contained in "Afterwords" or "Historical Notes"; the imaginative reconstruction of the diction and mentality of the past; the way Shakespearean phrases, names, and themes are appropriated; and the counterfactual scenarios writers invent as they reinvent the past.