As a professor of contemporary American literature and historical fiction, Alexander Manshel is no stranger to the popularity of contemporary historical fiction novels. His newest book, “Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon”, published by Columbia University Press, takes a close look at both the commercially successful and prize-winning historical genres that have made the literary careers of some of today’s most well- known writers, like Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, Michael Chabon and Yaa Gyasi.
In his book, Professor Manshel offers readers new insight into how institutions shape and influence the popularity of literary genres and how historical fiction continues to be a powerful and emotional tool readers use to develop historical knowledge and belonging.
We spoke to Professor Manshel about his latest book, readers’ fascination with historical narratives and what literary trends say about the stories we enjoy.
Q: How did the idea for this book come about? Did your own reading tastes influence the books and authors you examine in ‘Writing Backwards’?
The original idea for the book came to me about a decade ago, when I noticed that a number of newly released novels and films were interested in the history of the very recent past. That is, they were fictionalizing major historical events from only a few years earlier. In trying to investigate whether this was becoming more common in contemporary fiction, I stumbled upon a much larger phenomenon: namely, that the great majority of novels that were most prized by literary awards, most taught in universities, and most studied by scholars were set in the historical past. And that’s where the idea for the book came from. Before I began this project, I wouldn’t have considered myself a big fan of historical fiction, but part of what I discovered along the way is that a lot of what we have been calling literary fiction for the last five decades (at least in North America and the U.K.) is just that.
Q: Historical fiction has been a relatively popular fiction genre since its conception in the early 19th century by writers like Sir Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac and James Fenimore Cooper. Why do you think this genre of fiction continues to draw readers across the centuries?
Our understanding of the historical past is inseparable from the structure of the stories we tell about it. As Hayden White argued half a century ago, the idea that “the difference between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ resides in the fact that the historian ‘finds’ his stories, whereas the fiction writer ‘invents’ his” overlooks both the historian’s commitment to narrative tropes and the historical novelist’s commitment to factual research. As the writers I examine in my book demonstrate, literary fiction is a powerful technology for producing historical knowledge.
Historical fiction shapes our collective memory, humanizes key events and periods, reveals the deeper roots of contemporary crises, challenges the historical record, exposes its lies and gaps, recovers disregarded stories, and conjures others to stand in for those that have been lost entirely. Not only meditating on the past but simulating an encounter with it, historical fiction turns its reader into a kind of time machine.
Q: Your book looks at how the shift to historical fiction is ‘particularly dramatic for writers of color’. Why is this the case?
Over the past five decades, Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous novelists have been celebrated almost exclusively for writing about the historical past. Of the top ten most-taught novels by writers of color published after 1945, eight are works of historical fiction. Of the fifty-four novels by writers of color to be shortlisted for a major American prize between 1980 and 2010, all but four are works of historical fiction. And these trends have only continued and compounded since.
Why is this? As I argue in the book, it’s not because minoritized writers have a particular penchant for historical fiction as a genre, but rather that they have been particularly incentivized to write about the past by key cultural institutions and their processes. These include the funding protocols for the US National Endowment for the Arts; the concentration of literary prize finalists around a small group of historical settings; the impact of the changing methodologies of literary studies on a new generation of American authors; the ever-widening historical scope of university literature syllabi; and the influence of news organizations on the priorities of contemporary publishing.
In the decades since the 1980s, as the American literary field became increasingly diverse, these institutions transformed in ways that promoted historical fiction as contemporary literature’s most prestigious and politically potent genre, especially for writers of color whose work was being properly recognized for the first time.
Q: Why are contemporary narratives of slavery, novels set during World War II, immigrant fiction and multigenerational family sagas so popular among readers? What do these individual genres tell us about the kinds of stories we want to read about?
Though the historical settings of contemporary American fiction are as diverse as the authors who create them, many recent historical novels fall into a small group of historical subgenres: contemporary narratives of slavery, Holocaust fiction and the World War II novel, the multigenerational family saga, narratives of immigration, and the novel of recent history. I devote a chapter of the book to each of these genres, and to documenting how their prominence has been encouraged by specific cultural organizations.
The multigenerational saga, for example, is popular in both university classrooms and in contemporary book clubs—two wildly different venues for reading. Although the family saga genre stretches at least as far back as the nineteenth century, its recent focus on the family histories of marginalized peoples is particularly well suited to the “empathetic” and edifying reading practices that dominate both the seminar room and the living room.
Part of what makes a novel such as Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing seem both readable and teachable is the way the novel narrates a wide array of historical moments, while also humanizing figures in each era who have been previously overlooked. By examining both that novel and its reception in these different venues, we can gain a better understanding of why the family saga genre has become so central, but also of what it says about today’s historical imagination and literary tastes.
Q: From your research and personal experience teaching 20th century and contemporary American fiction, what were some of the biggest or most surprising changes you’ve noticed in the literary canon as it is represented in university syllabi in recent years?
This is one of the central questions of the book, and I suppose my answer would be…In the decades since the 1980s, the American literary canon has undergone two major transformations, which I argue are actually related. The cultural organizations that fund, publish, prize, teach, and canonize literary fiction have become increasingly diverse, recognizing racially and ethnically minoritized writers that they had previously overlooked.
At the same time, these literary institutions have fundamentally reorganized themselves around the aesthetic, pedagogical, and political value of the historical past, privileging historical fiction above all other literary genres. This overwhelming turn toward the historical past has both motivated, and been motivated by, the increasing recognition of Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous writers within the literary canon.
Q: Your book also looks at literary works that are still excluded from the literary canon and do not receive considerable commercial success or recognition from literary prizes. Can you tell us about these books/authors/genres and why they are still underrepresented in these areas?
The flip side of the phenomenon I describe in the book — minoritized writers being increasingly celebrated for writing about the historical past — is that these same writers are often overlooked when they take up contemporary issues and set their work in the present. As just one example, consider the great wealth of contemporary fiction about the history of enslavement, while the “novel of mass incarceration” is largely overlooked not only by publishing houses and prize committees but also by university English departments.
Given the sheer scale of mass incarceration in the United States, the paucity of literary fiction addressing the phenomenon is startling. In the conclusion to the book, I write about three recent novels — Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019), and Tommy Orange’s There There (2018) — that acknowledge the impacts of history on the present, but also take place in that present, engaging issues of mass incarceration, racialized policing, drug addiction, gun violence, and child separation at the southern border of the United States. In this way, these novels work to excavate the present, bringing the contemporary period to light with the very same tools that have been used to uncover the past.
Q: What are you most excited for readers to learn from your book? What types of discussions are you hoping to elicit?
I hope that my book offers avid readers, students, and scholars of contemporary fiction a new account of why we read what we read, and what makes literary fiction “literary” in the first place. I hope, too, that the book demonstrates how widely disparate authors, genres, literary traditions, and cultural institutions are actually part of a shared project of historical recovery. Beyond that, I’m eager for the book’s readers to consider both the power and the limits of historical fiction.
In the United States, many of the novels and ideas discussed in the book have already been targeted by pundits, banned by local school boards, and outlawed by state legislators. I have little doubt that more will follow. These attacks on literary fiction and its historical thinking only testify to their potential power in contemporary life. At the same time, these assaults on narratives of history also emphasize their political limits. 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.
Over the last five decades, a number of literary institutions have inadvertently encouraged the belief that history can act as the central staging ground for issues of contemporary injustice and inequality. Given fiction’s extraordinary capacity to resuscitate the past, these institutions have at times mistaken historical recovery for a form of historical redress.
Q: Which contemporary authors do you enjoy reading? Are there any recent or upcoming publications you are looking forward to reading and sharing with our readers?
Some recently or soon-to-be published novels that I’ve enjoyed (or am looking forward to) include: Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto, Katie Kitamura’s A Separation and Intimacies, Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun, Namwali Serpell’s The Furrows, Emma Cline’s The Guest, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, and Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend (which will be published in early October).
Alexander Manshel is an assistant professor of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature in the department of English. His book, Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon, will be published by Columbia University Press in November. His research has appeared in the academic journals PMLA, Post45, and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, and his public scholarship has been published in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books. He is currently at work on his second monograph, tentatively titled “High School English: A History of American Reading.” Before coming to McGill, Manshel earned his PhD at Stanford University and an MA at the Bread Loaf School of English.