The Renaissance Historical Novel: Elizabethan and Jacobean Historical Fiction

这不是对以文艺复兴为背景的当代小说的研究。这是一门关于16世纪和17世纪初散文小说的研究，以过去为背景。我的目的是考察这些小说可能像现代历史小说那样运作的方式，通过提供一个按时间顺序区分的背景，包括故事的整体意义或所提供的乐趣的一部分。也许16世纪和17世纪英国创作的大部分小说都是以过去为背景的。洛奇、西德尼、纳什、德洛尼：那个时期的所有主要散文作家都创作了历史小说，背景从古代(菲利普·西德尼爵士的《阿卡迪亚》)到相对较近的过去(纳什的《不幸的旅行者》中的亨利八世)。有人甚至可以说，这是一部具有当代背景的小说，在这个时代是不寻常的。然而，到目前为止，这种历史偏见没有受到任何形式的持续批判性考虑。在很大程度上，没有表达出来的假设似乎是，如果1578年出版的一部散文小说的开篇宣称，它的背景设定在伟大的皇帝君士坦丁让君士坦丁堡的人民与罗马高贵公民的种族一起出现之后，就像玛格丽特·泰勒翻译的《骑士之镜》所做的那样，这相当于在说……，因此，任何这样的历史姿态基本上都是中立的。这项研究将提出相反的观点：它不是，或者至少不一定是这样，因此提出这样一个问题：文艺复兴时期的散文小说如何回应和表现历史差异的事实？这是一个文学批评项目，因此它旨在促进对早期现代散文小说艺术性的高度欣赏，但它也是一个旨在开启对更大历史问题的思考的项目。小说作家是如何理解过去的，又是如何在小说中运用过去的？他们的小说告诉了我们关于他们创作时期的历史文化，而不是他们所处的时代？早期现代小说的历史观与那个时期的正式历史写作中的历史观有区别吗？鉴于文艺复兴的特点往往是对古典历史的更好理解，这种历史意义与更大的分期问题可能有什么关系？最后，早期现代的历史文化与我们自己的有什么相似或不同之处？最后一个问题提供了比较早期、现代和当代历史知识形式的机会，通过可能对它们进行编码的文学形式。如果说早期散文小说大多以过去为背景这一事实从未得到任何实质性的批判性讨论，那么它的现代类比也可以这样说。历史小说是最受欢迎的文学形式之一，也是研究最少的文学形式之一。在创作了大约70年后，卢卡奇的作品仍然是为数不多的致力于这一流派的专著之一。当人们考虑到对调解和表现的历史学问题的‘后现代’迷恋时，这种缺席变得更加值得注意，它倾向于详细描述充斥着现在的多重、可选的、在某种意义上是想象中的过去。像托比·朱特的《战后》这样的当代政治史几乎不可避免地围绕着一个元历史主题进行组织，即历史进步可能是如何被过去的连续重构所标志甚至推动的。这种现代自我意识的一个方面是重建不同的、过去想象历史的方式，从而更好地以我们自己独特的知识模式理解我们自己；这正是我在这里提出的，通过我特别的文学主题，它提供了进行这种比较的可能性。

This is not a study of contemporary fiction set in the Renaissance. It is a study of prose fiction from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that is set in the past. My aim is to examine the ways in which these fictions might operate like a modern historical novel, by providing a chronologically distinct setting that comprises some part of the overall significance of or pleasure afforded by the story. Perhaps a majority of the fiction composed in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is set in the past. Lodge, Sidney, Nashe, Deloney: all the major prose writers of the period produced historical fiction, with settings ranging from the ancient world (as in Sir Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia') to the relatively recent past (the time of Henry VIII, in Nashe's 'The Unfortunate Traveller'). One might go so far as to say that it was fiction with a contemporary setting that was unusual at this time. Yet this historical bias has so far escaped any sort of sustained critical consideration. For the most part, the unexpressed assumption seems to be that if a prose fiction published in 1578 opens by declaring that it is set 'after that the great Emperour Constantine had people of Constantinople with the race of the noble Citizens of Rome', as Margaret Tyler's translation of 'The Mirror of Knighthood' does, this is as much as to say, 'once upon a time ...', and that any such historical gesture is therefore essentially neutral. This study will argue the opposite: that it is not, or at least not necessarily so, and therefore to ask the question: how does Renaissance prose fiction respond to and represent the fact of historical difference?This is a literary-critical project, and as such it aims to promote a heightened appreciation of the artistry of early modern prose fiction, but it is also one designed to open out into a consideration of larger historical questions. How do writers of fiction understand the past, and how do they put it to use in their fictions? What do their fictions have to tell us about the historical culture of the period of their composition, as opposed to the period in which they are set? Is the historical vision of early modern fiction distinct from that evident in formal historical writing of the period? How might this historical sense relate to larger questions of periodization, given that the Renaissance is so often characterised by an improved understanding of the classical past in particular? And, finally, how does the historical culture of the early modern period resemble or differ from our own? This last question affords the opportunity of a comparison between early modern and contemporary forms of historical knowledge, via the literary formats that might encode them. If the fact that the majority of early prose fiction is set in the past has never received any substantial critical discussion, the same might be said of its modern analogue. The historical novel is one of the most popular of literary forms, and one of the least studied. Some seventy years after its composition, Lukacs' work remains one of the few monographs devoted to the genre. This absence becomes all the more noteworthy when one considers the 'postmodern' fascination with historiographic issues of mediation and representation, its penchant for detailing the multiple, alternative and in some sense imaginary pasts that populate the present. A contemporary political history like Toby Judt's 'Postwar' almost inevitably organises itself around a metahistorical theme, of how historical progress may be marked or even driven by successive reconfigurations of the past. One aspect of this modern self-consciousness would be to reconstruct different, past ways of imagining history, the better thereby to understand ourselves in our own distinctive modes of knowledge; and this, through my specifically literary theme, which offers the possibility of such comparisions, is exactly what I am proposing here.