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historical fiction
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From: The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature
Date: 20030101
Author:MARGARET DRABBLE and JENNY STRINGER
historical fiction,
The origins of the British historical novel are congenital with those of the Gothic novel, in the larger-than-life conceptions of Elizabethan and ‘heroic’ Restoration drama. Deeper roots can be traced in medieval romances of chivalry. A convenient generic starting point is Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). As W. Scott noted, this was ‘the first attempt to found a tale of amusing fiction upon the ancient romances of chivalry’. Otranto patented many of the conventional devices of the Gothic-historical tale—the ruined ...Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.
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