War and peaceful day Historical fiction rose to prominence in Europe during the early 19th century as part of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, especially through the influence of the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, whose works were immensely popular throughout Europe. Among his early European followers we can find Willibald Alexis, Theodor Fontane, Bernhard Severin Ingemann, Miklós Jósika, Mór Jókai, Jakob van Lennep, Demetrius Bikelos, Enrique Gil y Carrasco, Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, Victor Rydberg, Andreas Munch, Alessandro Manzoni, Alfred de Vigny, Honoré de Balzac or Prosper Mérimée.[15][16][17][18][19] Jane Porter's 1803 novel Thaddeus of Warsaw is one of the earliest examples of the historical novel in English and went through at least 84 editions.[20] including translation into French and German,[21][22][23] The first true historical novel in English was in fact Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1800).[24]
In the 20th century György Lukács argued that Scott was the first fiction writer who saw history not just as a convenient frame in which to stage a contemporary narrative, but rather as a distinct social and cultural setting.[25] Scott's Scottish novels such as Waverley (1814) and Rob Roy (1817) focused upon a middling character who sits at the intersection of various social groups in order to explore the development of society through conflict.[26] Ivanhoe (1820) gained credit for renewing interest in the Middle Ages.
Many well-known writers from the United Kingdom published historical novels in the mid 19th century, the most notable include Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, George Eliot's Romola, and Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! and Hereward the Wake. The Trumpet-Major (1880) is Thomas Hardy's only historical novel, and is set in Weymouth during the Napoleonic wars,[27] when the town was then anxious about the possibility of invasion by Napoleon.[28]
In the United States, James Fenimore Cooper was a prominent author of historical novels who was influenced by Scott.[29] His most famous novel is The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826), the second book of the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy.[30] The Last of the Mohicans is set in 1757, during the French and Indian War (the Seven Years' War), when France and Great Britain battled for control of North America. Cooper's chief rival,[31] John Neal, wrote Rachel Dyer (1828), the first bound novel about the 17th-century Salem witch trials.[32] Rachel Dyer also influenced future American fiction set in this period, like The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne[33] which is one of the most famous 19th-century American historical novels.[34] Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. In French literature, the most prominent inheritor of Scott's style of the historical novel was Balzac.[35] In 1829 Balzac published Les Chouans, a historical work in the manner of Sir Walter Scott.[36] This was subsequently incorporated into La Comédie Humaine. The bulk La Comédie Humaine, however, takes place during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy, though there are several novels which take place during the French Revolution and others which take place of in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, including About Catherine de Medici and The Elixir of Long Life.
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