What do you think?
Rate this book
Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon
Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. Midcentury writers tended to set their works in their own moment, but for the last several decades critical acclaim and attention have fixated on historical fiction. This shift is particularly dramatic for writers of color. Even as the literary canon has become more diverse, cultural institutions have celebrated Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous novelists almost exclusively for their historical fiction.
Writing Backwards explores what the dominance of historical fiction in the contemporary canon reveals about American literary culture. Alexander Manshel investigates the most celebrated historical genres―contemporary narratives of slavery, the World War II novel, the multigenerational family saga, immigrant fiction, and the novel of recent history―alongside the literary and academic institutions that have elevated them. He examines novels by writers including Toni Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Colson Whitehead, Julia Alvarez, Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Chabon, Julie Otsuka, Yaa Gyasi, Ben Lerner, and Tommy Orange in the context of MFA programs, literary prizes, university syllabi, book clubs, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Manshel studies how historical fiction has evolved over the last half century, documenting the formation of the newly inclusive literary canon as well as who and what it still excludes. Offering new insight into how institutions shape literature and the limits of historical memory, Writing Backwards also considers recent challenges to the historical turn in American fiction.
Writing Backwards explores what the dominance of historical fiction in the contemporary canon reveals about American literary culture. Alexander Manshel investigates the most celebrated historical genres―contemporary narratives of slavery, the World War II novel, the multigenerational family saga, immigrant fiction, and the novel of recent history―alongside the literary and academic institutions that have elevated them. He examines novels by writers including Toni Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Colson Whitehead, Julia Alvarez, Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Chabon, Julie Otsuka, Yaa Gyasi, Ben Lerner, and Tommy Orange in the context of MFA programs, literary prizes, university syllabi, book clubs, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Manshel studies how historical fiction has evolved over the last half century, documenting the formation of the newly inclusive literary canon as well as who and what it still excludes. Offering new insight into how institutions shape literature and the limits of historical memory, Writing Backwards also considers recent challenges to the historical turn in American fiction.
352 pages, Hardcover
Published November 21, 2023
2 people are currently reading
172 people want to read
About the author
Alexander Manshel
2 books1 followerAlexander Manshel is an assistant professor of English at McGill University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
Read
December 29, 2023notes that previous scholarship has attributed "American fiction's fascination with history to a post-Cold War 'absence of an overarching narrative,' 'symbolic compensation' for a postmodern 'crisis' in historical consciousness and shifting theories of historiography." But he locates the historical turn in NEA award processes (based on what types of books do, in fact, get awards). (5)
notes the prevalence of slavery, Holocaust fiction and the World War II novel, multigenerational family saga, immigration, and recent history as the main forms of historical fiction (13).
defines his subject as the "wide range of contemporary American fiction set in the historical past and invested in recovering the stories of events, persons, or peoples that have been lost or overlooked" (16).
These books are exemplars of a post-postmodern, "newly sincere belief in fiction's ability to access, reconstruct, and even recuperate the historical past:" post-irony, new sincerity, "postmodern techniques like genre pastiche, intertextual citation, and metafiction are repurposed not as a means of interrogating the very possibility of historical knowledge, but rather as a method for producing that knowledge in the first place" (19)
argues that there's an "archival imperative" that emerges from "historicism's and literary multiculturalism's shared project of recovery," such that there are infinite forgotten stories that should be recovered (20)
argues that "the American literary field has increasingly incentivized this recovery work over and above fictionalizations of present political realities . . . [as Kenneth Warren argues], over the last five decades the American literary canon has shifted from a primarily 'prospective' orientation - one focused firmly on the present in order to imagine a materially different future - to a primarily 'retrospective' one, borne back ceaselessly into the past (27). My question here is - what evidence do we have that the purpose of earlier focuses on the present were "in order to imagine a materially different future"? Is that just an ipso facto assumption?
All the Light we Cannot See "fashions [the] WWII novel into an ornate cabinet of curiosities, a collection of eccentricities and arcane fascinations that produces a sense of historical specificity, which can be read as a kind of unconscious compensation for the deracination of whiteness" (30)
"Ben Lerner applies the historiographic paradigms of 'microhistory' and 'history from below'(30)
_A Kind of Freedom_ considers "empathetic reading practices writ large, questioning whether they have unintentionally become a recipe for learned and compassionate inaction. While the multigenerational family saga represents the apotheosis of American literature's turn toward the historical past, it also emphasizes the growing disconnect between knowledge of that past and political intervention in the present" (38).
Argues that Time's Arrow exemplifies a particular moment - not the near-event jingoism nor the later "postmodern 'problematizing' of historical knowledge as such, but rather a complex nostalgia for a time of epic struggle and horrific yet clarifying atrocity" (60). Amis argued that the war was "the central event of the 20th century, the culminating event of history" (I think those who survived the Great War would be surprised to hear this). He also argued that writers of a previous generation who had not lived through WWII lived in a different kind of world.
"Collective memory as it circulates in literary representations of the past, in cultural appraisals of which fictions of history matter most, and in the economy of literary prestige -- where prizes consecrate 'winners' and disregard 'losers' entirely - is, to some extent, competitive." (95).
The whiteness of representations of World War II: "94 percent of the shortlisted works of World War II historical fiction were by white writers" (97); shortlisted fiction about Vietnam was 100% white - despite the fact that 28 of 30 shortlisted novels by minoritized writers in the 1980s and 1990s were historical fiction. And those WWII novels were becoming more reverent and sincere (than Catch 22 and Gravity's Rainbow)._
In _Looking for the Good War_ (2021), Elizabeth Samet argues that this was the moment when 'the most enduring and tenacious iteration of America's Wrold War II myth was burnished to perfection.' For Samet, both this mythology and the texts that propagated it are defined by several 'keynotes,': namely, that US involvement in the war was liberatory, united, reluctant, and decent; in all, 'a foreign tragedy with a happy American ending.'" The main critiques of the 'Good War mythology' are its whitewashing of the American war effort (whiteness of band of brothers, Brokaw's 50 characters)
_Clay Walls_ - which Morrison did not publish though she was queried -- portrays the experience of Korean Americans being stigmatized and misperceived as Japanese Americans during WWII, "dramtiz[ing] the racialized contradictions behind the facade of America's united front but also demonstrates how Korean Americans during WWII were caught up in multiple anticolonial conflicts at once. When the war with Germany and Japan finally comes to an end, there is little solace for Haesu and her friends in the Korean independence movement, and no postwar consensus to speak of (103).
argues that the prevalence of "marvels and miniatures" in WWII historical fiction (pairing details of radio technology and shells with prestigious topics like WWII), are like "Jeremy Rosen's description of historical novels about the spouses of famous figures: namely, that they 'combine the recognizable symbolic signifier . .. with an alternative take or perspective, familiarity with prestige and novelty" (109).
Further argues that when the novels of the 2010s and 2020s have young writers, it reinscribes the authors' memories of hearing their grandparents' stories of the war as children. And that the use of child narrators allows them to recover a kind of innocence not otherwise available in such a violent conflict (113).
"The repeated consecration of a given period or event does not just denote a shared sense of its artistic seriousness, it also signals to readers, publishers, agents, and authors what is considered ambitious, praiseworthy, and literary in the first place" (120).
Although Whitehead's _The Intuitionist_ can in some ways be considered to be a pastiche of times, it "nodes to the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement and the decades in between because that was precisely the period of so many African American 'firsts'" (126).
"What better way for the left to dispute the critique that literary multiculturalism was both erasing history and sacrificing quality than to prize, study, and teach a new canon of novels deeply concerned with the historical past and therefore imbued with the authority that its historicity affords? John Guillory has argued that 'a syllabus of study always enacts a negotiation between historical works and modern works' and that 'obviously in order to 'open [the literary] canon, one would have to modernize it, to displace the preponderance of works from earlier to later." But while this seems obvious, it is not entirely accurate. Certainly, in order to diversify the list of authors taught in the university English classroom, it is necessary to devote greater attention to periods in which marginalized writers had at least a modicum of access to the means of literary production. That said, what better way to mitigate this necessary modernization than by canonizing minoritized authors almost exclusively for the writing of historical fiction?" (131).
Whitehead and Tracy Smith were at Harvard in the 80s/90s - like many other minoritized writers, who are very heavily graduates of elite institutions (133)
Georg Lukacs "has argued that the protagonist of the historical novel must be a' middling' figure, "never heroic" but thrust into a decisive moment of historical transition" (though protagonist of The Intuitionist violates this). Also the intuitionist's "indeterminate setting undermines the idea of neat historical breaks, pointing up the uneven and often illusory qualities of progress") (139)
"Jameson has derided contemporary historical fiction for what he calls its 'nostalgia' art language' and its 'random cannibalization of . . . the styles of the past,' Whitehead interleaves a range of period styles in part to critique such nostalgia as a weapon of conservatism seeking to revert to the time of 'our fathers' . . . If the novel appears to abandon what Jameson has described as 'the American history we learn from schoolbooks,' that is because Whitehead is arguing that we need better schoolbooks" (139).
Amy Elias says "postmodern lilterature . . . seems hyperconsciously aware that the drive to write and know history may be a futile endeavor, at worst an imperialist drive to control the past, at most a Hollywood-inspired move to profit from history's . . . .simulation." Yet in The Intuitionist, history IS accessible, and Lila Mae ends by writing historical fiction . . . though in the end, the intuitionist vs. empiricist argument is moot, it's the elevator companies, "the guys who make the things . . . that matter." "The battle over the canon of elevator studies is less a frontline conflict than a rearguard action of an increasingly irrelevant corps of institute professors. this is precisely Guillory's conclusion about the 1990s canon wars: namely, that 'it has proven to be much easier to quarrel about the content of the curriculum than to confront the implications of a fully emergent professional-managerial class' that cares little for literature" (141) (or, more accurately, a fully emergent late capitalist debt peon class that must focus more on vocational skills than literature -- or, more accurately, for whom STEM and business skills ARE the requisite skills, in the same way that the liberal arts were for the wealthy and clergy in the past.)
Argues that Beloved's concept of rememory, designed to "bring the atrocities of American slavery back to life and into national consciousness" are three decades later not "unequivocally productive, especially when pressed into the service of specious narratives of progress," (154). In fact, they can reinscribe the state of display/surveillance that is one hallmark of slavery itself. The Underground Railroad interrogates this genre, Levy-Hussen argues that "decades after the invention of such insurgent art and scholarship, justice and liberation remain frustratingly deferred . . . " Colson's Living History therefore dramatizes "the genre's tragic ineffectuality, its inability to compel the radical change it desires" (154). Cora interrupts this by the order in which she enacts the set pieces (from slavery to ship to Africa), and through the temporal complexity/layering of other aspects of the narrative (both teh Fugitive Slave Law, 1921 Black Wall Street massacre, Tuskegee syphilis study (155).
Says Whitehead is engaging in a politics of indirection b/c the killings of the late 2010s called him to turn to a history of an abusive school in the past, rather than engaging directly with the present day (160). Why is it that, to make sense of this moment, Whitehead would "travel more than a half cenutry into the past" ? (159)
"Whitehead's twist endings create something like the opposite effect of dramatic and historical irony> rather than confirm that readers know something that the characters do not these reveals point up that the readerly hope for a recuperative history are misplaced and empahsizes the limits of historical fiction as a means of addressing the challenges of the present" (161).
argues that multigenerational family saga fits well with the empathetic and pedagogical reading practices that dominate both English departments and middlebrow book clubs (168). Reading to learn and reading to feel have become intertwined. They both "exemplify the pedagogical, political, and affective imperatives to amplify the historically voiceless. But it also typifies the limits of contemporary literature's fixation on historical fiction, chief among them the increasingly imperceptible disconnect between knowledge of the past and action in the present" (170).
Argues that book clubs and universities are both "thoroughly 'middle-class institutions, part of a package of values that includes education and self-improvement' (Beth Driscoll) and the desires to learn and feel are co-mingled (175). The readers guide for Pachinko focused on knowing (did you know much about the Japanese occupation of Korea?) and feeling (which character did you identify with most and why?) (175)
In short: does all this historicism come at the cost of engaging meaningfully with the present? (194) - basically, it misunderstands contextualization as a form of resistance.
Points out the ways the nonlinear narrative of A Kind of Freedom subverts "the easy correlation between narrative progress and political progress" (196). The author said these narrative structures are to demonstrate how "some strands of history just weave themselves into the present over and over" (198)
Quotes Namwali Serpell's The Banality of Empathy - it's selfish (203). "the idea that readers can and ought to use art to inhabit others, especially the marginalized can all too easily lead to the 'relishing of suffering by those who are safe from it' and become 'an emotional palliative that distracts us from real inequities'" (203).
historical fiction often nationalist 225
argues that recent historical fictions turn out just as they are now (232)
Quotes Mark Currie "the contemporary world increasingly experiences the present, both personally and collectively, as the object of a future memory" (233). (From The Novel and the Moving Now)
"Historical fiction shapes our collective memory, personifies key events and periods, reveals the deeper roots of contemporary crises, unsettles neat chronologies, challenges the historical record, exposes its lies and lacunae, recovers disregarded stories, and conjures others to stand in for those that have been lost entirely" (242).
"Although it may be comforting to imagine that these efforts to stymie literary culture and sanitize the historical record will someday be judged harshly by history, that way of thinking only highlights how thoroughly retrospection, and the anticipation of it, have come to frame contemporary politics. Understanding the past is a necessary but ultimately insufficient condition for effecting change in the present" (243). Institutions have mistaken "historical recovery for a form of historical redress"
Backwards Novels:
Martin Amis: Time's Arrow
Julia Alvarez: How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents
Tommy Orange
Yaa Gyasi
Valeria Luiselli
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Ishmael Reed
notes the prevalence of slavery, Holocaust fiction and the World War II novel, multigenerational family saga, immigration, and recent history as the main forms of historical fiction (13).
defines his subject as the "wide range of contemporary American fiction set in the historical past and invested in recovering the stories of events, persons, or peoples that have been lost or overlooked" (16).
These books are exemplars of a post-postmodern, "newly sincere belief in fiction's ability to access, reconstruct, and even recuperate the historical past:" post-irony, new sincerity, "postmodern techniques like genre pastiche, intertextual citation, and metafiction are repurposed not as a means of interrogating the very possibility of historical knowledge, but rather as a method for producing that knowledge in the first place" (19)
argues that there's an "archival imperative" that emerges from "historicism's and literary multiculturalism's shared project of recovery," such that there are infinite forgotten stories that should be recovered (20)
argues that "the American literary field has increasingly incentivized this recovery work over and above fictionalizations of present political realities . . . [as Kenneth Warren argues], over the last five decades the American literary canon has shifted from a primarily 'prospective' orientation - one focused firmly on the present in order to imagine a materially different future - to a primarily 'retrospective' one, borne back ceaselessly into the past (27). My question here is - what evidence do we have that the purpose of earlier focuses on the present were "in order to imagine a materially different future"? Is that just an ipso facto assumption?
All the Light we Cannot See "fashions [the] WWII novel into an ornate cabinet of curiosities, a collection of eccentricities and arcane fascinations that produces a sense of historical specificity, which can be read as a kind of unconscious compensation for the deracination of whiteness" (30)
"Ben Lerner applies the historiographic paradigms of 'microhistory' and 'history from below'(30)
_A Kind of Freedom_ considers "empathetic reading practices writ large, questioning whether they have unintentionally become a recipe for learned and compassionate inaction. While the multigenerational family saga represents the apotheosis of American literature's turn toward the historical past, it also emphasizes the growing disconnect between knowledge of that past and political intervention in the present" (38).
Argues that Time's Arrow exemplifies a particular moment - not the near-event jingoism nor the later "postmodern 'problematizing' of historical knowledge as such, but rather a complex nostalgia for a time of epic struggle and horrific yet clarifying atrocity" (60). Amis argued that the war was "the central event of the 20th century, the culminating event of history" (I think those who survived the Great War would be surprised to hear this). He also argued that writers of a previous generation who had not lived through WWII lived in a different kind of world.
"Collective memory as it circulates in literary representations of the past, in cultural appraisals of which fictions of history matter most, and in the economy of literary prestige -- where prizes consecrate 'winners' and disregard 'losers' entirely - is, to some extent, competitive." (95).
The whiteness of representations of World War II: "94 percent of the shortlisted works of World War II historical fiction were by white writers" (97); shortlisted fiction about Vietnam was 100% white - despite the fact that 28 of 30 shortlisted novels by minoritized writers in the 1980s and 1990s were historical fiction. And those WWII novels were becoming more reverent and sincere (than Catch 22 and Gravity's Rainbow)._
In _Looking for the Good War_ (2021), Elizabeth Samet argues that this was the moment when 'the most enduring and tenacious iteration of America's Wrold War II myth was burnished to perfection.' For Samet, both this mythology and the texts that propagated it are defined by several 'keynotes,': namely, that US involvement in the war was liberatory, united, reluctant, and decent; in all, 'a foreign tragedy with a happy American ending.'" The main critiques of the 'Good War mythology' are its whitewashing of the American war effort (whiteness of band of brothers, Brokaw's 50 characters)
_Clay Walls_ - which Morrison did not publish though she was queried -- portrays the experience of Korean Americans being stigmatized and misperceived as Japanese Americans during WWII, "dramtiz[ing] the racialized contradictions behind the facade of America's united front but also demonstrates how Korean Americans during WWII were caught up in multiple anticolonial conflicts at once. When the war with Germany and Japan finally comes to an end, there is little solace for Haesu and her friends in the Korean independence movement, and no postwar consensus to speak of (103).
argues that the prevalence of "marvels and miniatures" in WWII historical fiction (pairing details of radio technology and shells with prestigious topics like WWII), are like "Jeremy Rosen's description of historical novels about the spouses of famous figures: namely, that they 'combine the recognizable symbolic signifier . .. with an alternative take or perspective, familiarity with prestige and novelty" (109).
Further argues that when the novels of the 2010s and 2020s have young writers, it reinscribes the authors' memories of hearing their grandparents' stories of the war as children. And that the use of child narrators allows them to recover a kind of innocence not otherwise available in such a violent conflict (113).
"The repeated consecration of a given period or event does not just denote a shared sense of its artistic seriousness, it also signals to readers, publishers, agents, and authors what is considered ambitious, praiseworthy, and literary in the first place" (120).
Although Whitehead's _The Intuitionist_ can in some ways be considered to be a pastiche of times, it "nodes to the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement and the decades in between because that was precisely the period of so many African American 'firsts'" (126).
"What better way for the left to dispute the critique that literary multiculturalism was both erasing history and sacrificing quality than to prize, study, and teach a new canon of novels deeply concerned with the historical past and therefore imbued with the authority that its historicity affords? John Guillory has argued that 'a syllabus of study always enacts a negotiation between historical works and modern works' and that 'obviously in order to 'open [the literary] canon, one would have to modernize it, to displace the preponderance of works from earlier to later." But while this seems obvious, it is not entirely accurate. Certainly, in order to diversify the list of authors taught in the university English classroom, it is necessary to devote greater attention to periods in which marginalized writers had at least a modicum of access to the means of literary production. That said, what better way to mitigate this necessary modernization than by canonizing minoritized authors almost exclusively for the writing of historical fiction?" (131).
Whitehead and Tracy Smith were at Harvard in the 80s/90s - like many other minoritized writers, who are very heavily graduates of elite institutions (133)
Georg Lukacs "has argued that the protagonist of the historical novel must be a' middling' figure, "never heroic" but thrust into a decisive moment of historical transition" (though protagonist of The Intuitionist violates this). Also the intuitionist's "indeterminate setting undermines the idea of neat historical breaks, pointing up the uneven and often illusory qualities of progress") (139)
"Jameson has derided contemporary historical fiction for what he calls its 'nostalgia' art language' and its 'random cannibalization of . . . the styles of the past,' Whitehead interleaves a range of period styles in part to critique such nostalgia as a weapon of conservatism seeking to revert to the time of 'our fathers' . . . If the novel appears to abandon what Jameson has described as 'the American history we learn from schoolbooks,' that is because Whitehead is arguing that we need better schoolbooks" (139).
Amy Elias says "postmodern lilterature . . . seems hyperconsciously aware that the drive to write and know history may be a futile endeavor, at worst an imperialist drive to control the past, at most a Hollywood-inspired move to profit from history's . . . .simulation." Yet in The Intuitionist, history IS accessible, and Lila Mae ends by writing historical fiction . . . though in the end, the intuitionist vs. empiricist argument is moot, it's the elevator companies, "the guys who make the things . . . that matter." "The battle over the canon of elevator studies is less a frontline conflict than a rearguard action of an increasingly irrelevant corps of institute professors. this is precisely Guillory's conclusion about the 1990s canon wars: namely, that 'it has proven to be much easier to quarrel about the content of the curriculum than to confront the implications of a fully emergent professional-managerial class' that cares little for literature" (141) (or, more accurately, a fully emergent late capitalist debt peon class that must focus more on vocational skills than literature -- or, more accurately, for whom STEM and business skills ARE the requisite skills, in the same way that the liberal arts were for the wealthy and clergy in the past.)
Argues that Beloved's concept of rememory, designed to "bring the atrocities of American slavery back to life and into national consciousness" are three decades later not "unequivocally productive, especially when pressed into the service of specious narratives of progress," (154). In fact, they can reinscribe the state of display/surveillance that is one hallmark of slavery itself. The Underground Railroad interrogates this genre, Levy-Hussen argues that "decades after the invention of such insurgent art and scholarship, justice and liberation remain frustratingly deferred . . . " Colson's Living History therefore dramatizes "the genre's tragic ineffectuality, its inability to compel the radical change it desires" (154). Cora interrupts this by the order in which she enacts the set pieces (from slavery to ship to Africa), and through the temporal complexity/layering of other aspects of the narrative (both teh Fugitive Slave Law, 1921 Black Wall Street massacre, Tuskegee syphilis study (155).
Says Whitehead is engaging in a politics of indirection b/c the killings of the late 2010s called him to turn to a history of an abusive school in the past, rather than engaging directly with the present day (160). Why is it that, to make sense of this moment, Whitehead would "travel more than a half cenutry into the past" ? (159)
"Whitehead's twist endings create something like the opposite effect of dramatic and historical irony> rather than confirm that readers know something that the characters do not these reveals point up that the readerly hope for a recuperative history are misplaced and empahsizes the limits of historical fiction as a means of addressing the challenges of the present" (161).
argues that multigenerational family saga fits well with the empathetic and pedagogical reading practices that dominate both English departments and middlebrow book clubs (168). Reading to learn and reading to feel have become intertwined. They both "exemplify the pedagogical, political, and affective imperatives to amplify the historically voiceless. But it also typifies the limits of contemporary literature's fixation on historical fiction, chief among them the increasingly imperceptible disconnect between knowledge of the past and action in the present" (170).
Argues that book clubs and universities are both "thoroughly 'middle-class institutions, part of a package of values that includes education and self-improvement' (Beth Driscoll) and the desires to learn and feel are co-mingled (175). The readers guide for Pachinko focused on knowing (did you know much about the Japanese occupation of Korea?) and feeling (which character did you identify with most and why?) (175)
In short: does all this historicism come at the cost of engaging meaningfully with the present? (194) - basically, it misunderstands contextualization as a form of resistance.
Points out the ways the nonlinear narrative of A Kind of Freedom subverts "the easy correlation between narrative progress and political progress" (196). The author said these narrative structures are to demonstrate how "some strands of history just weave themselves into the present over and over" (198)
Quotes Namwali Serpell's The Banality of Empathy - it's selfish (203). "the idea that readers can and ought to use art to inhabit others, especially the marginalized can all too easily lead to the 'relishing of suffering by those who are safe from it' and become 'an emotional palliative that distracts us from real inequities'" (203).
historical fiction often nationalist 225
argues that recent historical fictions turn out just as they are now (232)
Quotes Mark Currie "the contemporary world increasingly experiences the present, both personally and collectively, as the object of a future memory" (233). (From The Novel and the Moving Now)
"Historical fiction shapes our collective memory, personifies key events and periods, reveals the deeper roots of contemporary crises, unsettles neat chronologies, challenges the historical record, exposes its lies and lacunae, recovers disregarded stories, and conjures others to stand in for those that have been lost entirely" (242).
"Although it may be comforting to imagine that these efforts to stymie literary culture and sanitize the historical record will someday be judged harshly by history, that way of thinking only highlights how thoroughly retrospection, and the anticipation of it, have come to frame contemporary politics. Understanding the past is a necessary but ultimately insufficient condition for effecting change in the present" (243). Institutions have mistaken "historical recovery for a form of historical redress"
Backwards Novels:
Martin Amis: Time's Arrow
Julia Alvarez: How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents
Tommy Orange
Yaa Gyasi
Valeria Luiselli
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Ishmael Reed
May 29, 2024
Wide ranging account of history as it shows up in different "canon" books. Manshell offers a really good account of how the institutional conditions of literary production show up in the plots and literary effects of the texts themselves, which I always want to see. This is especially true in his treatments of Whitehead, Lerner, and Amis. I have owned Time's Arrow by Martin Amis for about twenty years and never read it and then this book spoiled it for me. But at this point I think it's my own fault. Now I will spoil this book (kinda): it ends with one of the quotes about the past you're always hearing (the Faulkner one). It does *not* feature the Jameson quote about history. To make up for that I will treat you to a Feghoot I made up about that Jameson quote.
Ferdinand Feghoot is helping Fredric Jameson organize an interdisciplinary conference. Because of certain arcane accounting practices at the university, they are booking the visiting professors rental cars from different agencies; and each agency will be matched with a department. Feghoot is going over which professors are headed to which rental business, and tries to run down the list from memory with Jameson one more time. "English," he says, "is Alamo; Economics is Budget; Political Science is Enterprise; and History is....what, Hertz?"
Ferdinand Feghoot is helping Fredric Jameson organize an interdisciplinary conference. Because of certain arcane accounting practices at the university, they are booking the visiting professors rental cars from different agencies; and each agency will be matched with a department. Feghoot is going over which professors are headed to which rental business, and tries to run down the list from memory with Jameson one more time. "English," he says, "is Alamo; Economics is Budget; Political Science is Enterprise; and History is....what, Hertz?"
November 9, 2024
When Ralph Ellison tried to capture the experience of being Black in American, he wrote Invisible Man. It was set in the Harlem of Ellison's time. When Toni Morrison wanted to do a similar thing thirty years later she wrote Beloved, which was set 100 years before its publication. This is not an isolated instance. Alexander Manshel's book asks why it is that so many of the most important books of the last thirty years -- books that have won or been short listed for major prizes and books that are taught in college English programs -- take place in the past. Roth, Hemingway, Updike and others wrote contemporary stories. But today the most important and well regarded books are historical novels. Why? His answer is fascinating. This is an insightful and original work of literary criticism. It examines the growth of previously marginalized voices and how they were encouraged to write stories rooted in a past that has not been well recorded. Manshel looks at World War 2 books, multi-generational family books and another genre he calls "recent historical novels." The tone is informative and respectful. There are no straw men arguments or blanket dismissals. Instead he examines the ways we root our stories in the past and the need to reassess the past as we open ourselves to the variety of voices writing right now.
February 1, 2025
Orgy of virtue-signaling.
Makes a big-to-do about "the LatinX" in WWII, but slyly presents only part of the picture. He somehow omits to mention a) that there was an entire division of LatinX, the 25oth Azul, fighting in Hitler's armies during WWII, b) where was it exactly that Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele fled to after WWII. Not to mention that, in 1938, LatinX sympathisers of Hitler tried to overthrow the government of Chile.
From an author who claims to "know history," and who mentions "the contribution of the LatinX during WWII," these are most curious omissions indeed...
Makes a big-to-do about "the LatinX" in WWII, but slyly presents only part of the picture. He somehow omits to mention a) that there was an entire division of LatinX, the 25oth Azul, fighting in Hitler's armies during WWII, b) where was it exactly that Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele fled to after WWII. Not to mention that, in 1938, LatinX sympathisers of Hitler tried to overthrow the government of Chile.
From an author who claims to "know history," and who mentions "the contribution of the LatinX during WWII," these are most curious omissions indeed...
Want to read
October 30, 2023focusing on reading about writing - this book, Big Fiction, The Sisterhood - is becoming more and more likely.
January 17, 2024
I gave this 5 stars because it's well-written, provide amazing food for thought and I found it super useful for a historical fiction workshop I'm teaching. I highly recommend!
March 10, 2024
Books like this should have labels that say they are dissertations aimed at a very select audience.
Although interesting, it suffers from the same problem as my own discipline (political science). It is heavy on jargon that has meaning to members of the discipline but presents an obstacle to being read by the general public. As such, it fails to make the case for reexamining what are considered representations of the American past.
This leads to my next major criticism, which is that this was less about reexamining the canon than about replacing it. A few authors (i.e., Morrison, Whitehead, Haley) received the focus of this book, with chapters dedicated to each as the icon for the new canon.
By focusing on race and ethnicity (the author's choice), he ignores the way in which a new generation of women writers (e.g., Quinn, Wiseman, Runyan) whose fiction is both popular and informs readers about what had been the invisible role of women in the past.
Although interesting, it suffers from the same problem as my own discipline (political science). It is heavy on jargon that has meaning to members of the discipline but presents an obstacle to being read by the general public. As such, it fails to make the case for reexamining what are considered representations of the American past.
This leads to my next major criticism, which is that this was less about reexamining the canon than about replacing it. A few authors (i.e., Morrison, Whitehead, Haley) received the focus of this book, with chapters dedicated to each as the icon for the new canon.
By focusing on race and ethnicity (the author's choice), he ignores the way in which a new generation of women writers (e.g., Quinn, Wiseman, Runyan) whose fiction is both popular and informs readers about what had been the invisible role of women in the past.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews