The Renaissance Historical Novel: Elizabethan and Jacobean Historical Fiction

这不是一个以文艺复兴为背景的当代小说研究。它是对16世纪到17世纪早期的散文小说的研究，以过去为背景。我的目的是研究这些小说如何像现代历史小说一样运作，通过提供一个按时间顺序不同的背景，包括故事所提供的总体意义或乐趣的一部分。也许大部分16和17世纪英国创作的小说都是以过去为背景的。洛奇、西德尼、纳什、德洛尼：这一时期的所有主要散文作家都创作了历史小说，故事背景从古代（如菲利普·西德尼爵士的《阿卡迪亚》）到相对较近的过去（如纳什的《不幸的旅行者》中的亨利八世时代）。有人甚至会说，这是一部以当代为背景的小说，在当时是不寻常的。然而，到目前为止，这种历史偏见还没有得到任何持续的批判性思考。在很大程度上，未表达的假设似乎是，如果1578年出版的一部散文小说开篇宣称，故事发生在“伟大的君士坦丁大帝让君士坦丁堡的人拥有罗马贵族公民的种族”之后，就像玛格丽特·泰勒翻译的《骑士之镜》一样，这就相当于说，“从前……因此，任何这样的历史姿态本质上都是中立的。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是如何回应和表现历史差异的事实的？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的高度欣赏，但它也是一个旨在打开一个更大的历史问题的考虑。小说作家如何理解过去，又如何在小说中运用过去？他们的小说要告诉我们他们创作时期的历史文化，而不是他们所设定的时期的历史文化？早期现代小说的历史观与那个时期的正式历史著作的历史观不同吗？考虑到文艺复兴经常以对古典历史的更好理解为特征，这种历史感如何与更大的分期问题联系起来呢？最后，近代早期的历史文化与我们的历史文化有何相似或不同？最后一个问题提供了一个比较早期现代和当代形式的历史知识的机会，通过可能编码它们的文学形式。如果说大多数早期散文小说以过去为背景这一事实从未得到任何实质性的批评讨论，那么现代的类似作品也可能如此。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。在卢卡奇的作品创作70年后，他的作品仍然是为数不多的专门研究这一流派的专著之一。当人们考虑到“后现代”对调解和代表的历史问题的迷恋时，这种缺失变得更加值得注意，它对详细描述多元，替代和在某种意义上虚构的过去的倾向，这些过去充斥着现在。像托比·朱特（Toby Judt）的《战后》（战后）这样的当代政治史几乎不可避免地围绕着一个超历史主题进行组织，即历史的进步是如何被标记的，甚至是由过去的连续重构所驱动的。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来理解我们自己；而这，通过我特别的文学主题，提供了这种比较的可能性，这正是我在这里要提出的。

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.