Point out the chief characteristics of the historical novel.

Or

How is historical novel different from history?

To present and interpret facts is the historian’s business, to summon up a past epoch, to show men and women alive in it and behaving as they must have behaved in the circumstances, is the labour and joy of the genuine historical novelist.” (E. A. Baker) A historical novel is an imaginative reconstruction of the past, dealing primarily with human character and interested in showing the life and manners of a by gone age. Leslie Stephen in his remarks on Romola describes the historical novel as a literary hybrid’. It is neither proper history, nor proper fiction. If the fiction element dominates, it ceases to be history, on the other hand, if the history element is too strong, to that extent it suffers as fiction.”

What is expected of a historical novelist is to represent the ways, manners, and customs of the past with a lively imagination. The aim of the historical novelist is not so much to focus attention on historical characters and events but to become a social chronicle representing the life and manners, the ways and feelings of the people of a particular period chosen by him for deliveation. Historical novel thus becomes a ‘magnetized history. The historical novel is a novel of manners as a contemporary might have written in a language intelligible to the people of his times..

Historical novel differs from the historical romance. The historical novel is a fictitious narrative differeing from the romance as the events are accomodated to the ordinary train of humorous events and the modern state of society. Stoddard rightly says, ‘A historical novel is a record of individual life, of individual emotion in circumstances and lives of historical interest.”

The historical novelist should be endowed with a fecund imagination to recreate the past and make the dry bones of history instinct with life. He should sweep back into the past flushing the stones of history with colour and brightness. The reconstruction of the past should not be the dust-dreary reconstruction of pedants, but warn, breathing and excitingly alive. The historical novel is an attempt to reconstruct the atmosphere, the habits of thought, the prevailing psychology of a generation with which the writer has had no intimate contact.” (Roger Daytaller).

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