Historical fiction

Ken Follett is a bestselling Welsh author of popular fiction novels who has sold over 130 million copies of his novels and has had a major influence on the world of literature during his career. Ken Follett’s influence on literature mainly consists of his enhancement of the writing style prevalent in the world of modern popular fiction and the thriller genre specifically, which he manages to make while still maintaining the objective of entertaining his readers. Follett’s childhood love of…

In Catherine Calloway’s article, “How to Tell a True War Story”: Metafiction in The Things They Carried, Calloway highlights the inner workings of both the writing style and alternate persona Tim O’Brien creates within the book. By using fiction and introducing different viewpoints, O’Brien is able to strengthen the truth behind the story. In order to tell his story, O’Brien uses many different types of elements, ranging from unfinished works to altering the stories to fit his narrative. However…

best book of the twentieth century. A.S. Bryatt (2001, p.302) asserts that 'the historical novel has been frowned on, and disapproved of, both by critics and by reviewers'. If we accept this, we must recognise that Barker's text came to the table…

also involved with some romance with the different sides. The author includes challenging situations and the feeling of losing a loved, to show how you would feel as if you were in the Civil War. Elliott shows how tough it could be. One example of historical accuracy is when Elliott shows how high the prices went up for everything at the time of a war. “Thirty dollars for a pair of shoes? Eight dollars for a turkey?” Then the woman held up a bracelet and asked the traveling merchant if he would…

Everybody has their favorite type of genre; whether it be science fiction, action, comedy, or horror. What all these have in common are how they are set up. Every genre follows a certain “formula.” So much so, that it can become repetitive, so people can become accustomed. Thomas Schatz found genre to be restrictive. However, they can change with what the people and industry want. It is a combination of narrative and cinematic elements that surround different conflicts. Genre is well-known…

work that this is not just a simple novel meant to entertain her audience using fiction. The details she provides about various events and the manner in which she chooses her words clearly points out that this is not a work of fiction. She narrates about her past experiences and how she related to people around her in a way that makes one believe that the work could even be an autobiography. However, references to historical facts that do not directly affect her eliminate the possibility that…

In her book, “A Poetics of Postmodernism”, Linda Hutcheon identifies the term postmodernism, when used in fiction, to describe fiction that is at once metafictional and historical in the way it presents the texts and contexts of the past (Hutcheon, 40). This is what she calls historiographic metafiction. Most of the historiographic novels emphasize self-reflexivity and our paradoxical relations to past events. Historiographic metafiction somehow acknowledges the paradox of the past, that is to…

I believe that the Legend of King Arthur is all fiction without any historical basis because there is no real evidence to support his existence and all of the evidence discovered ended up making more sense than not. Within the documentary, the narrator mentioned suspicious time figures between the evidence that had been mentioned for him. In example, the first writing of King Arthur was discovered three hundred years after his supposed death. This brings up suspicion because you would expect…

Many authors use these memories as inspiration for their writing. The historical accounts in Tim O’brien’s, The Things They Carried, come with some truths, but are mostly derived from what he believed would have happened. Although O’Brien himself did not witness the things he wrote about in his novel, he still is able to portray the struggles many soldiers went through. While reading The Things They Carried through the historical lens and examining the novel’s accuracy to events of the Vietnam…

reminds us that history is always an incomplete record and the events are ever changing as new information is considered. A large part of White’s focus of this essay is the boundaries between history and literature, fact and fiction. White believes historical narratives are verbal fiction.…