Contemporary English Historical Novel: Tradition and Dialogue with it

Abstract

  The article provides a problematic overview of the dynamics of the national English paradigm of the historical novel genre from the moment of its final formalization in the early XIX century to the modern stage of the development of the genre paradigm. The peculiarities of the functioning of the genre in the British literary process in the end of the XX century and early XXI century are specially demonstrated. The emphasis is placed on the postmodern «obsession with history» and the use by British historical novelists of a number of features of postmodern poetics in general, as well as on the continuity of the realistic tradition of the genre, which at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one resulted in the reconstruction in the historical narrative of not so much socio–political as socio-cultural bonds of history, in depicting a novel hero’s  integral living through the past when exactly this is both introspective and retrospective plot existing of history and when it becomes the object and subject of historical narration.