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This collection examines the intersection of historical recollection, strategies of representation, and reading practices in historical fiction from the eighteenth century to today. In shifting focus to the agency of the reader and taking a long historical view, the collection brings a new perspective to the field of historical representation.

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List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: ´Reading the Represented Past: History and Fiction from 1700 to the Present; K.Mitchell & N.Parsons Learning to Read the Past in the Early Historical Novel; A.Stevens Temporal Systems in Representations of the Past: Contingency, Free Will and Irony in Historical Fiction; H.Dalley ´All histories are against you?´: Family History, Domestic History and the Feminine Past in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion; M.Spongberg Rereading Hogarth and Pope: Authenticity and Academic Fictions of the Eighteenth Century; J.Ward ´Panoramic Byron: Reading, History and Pre-cinematic Spectacle; H.Groth ´The Painted Record´ in George Eliot´s Historical Novel Romola; K.Marler-Kennedy Reading and Remembering History in Daniel Defoe´s A Journal of the Plague Year ; N.Parsons The Gothic Reader: History, Fear and Trembling; D.Wallace Notes towards a Poethics of Spectrality: The Examples of Neo-Victorian Textuality; J.Wolfreys Dickens and Ways of Seeing the French Revolution: A Tale of Two Cities ; J.Mee The Uses of History: The Historical Novel in the Post-French Revolution Debate and Ellis Cornelia Knight´s Marcus Flaminius (1792); F.Price The Living Past and the Fellowship of Sacrificial Violence in William Morris´s A Dream of John Ball ; I.Hanson Bibliography Index

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´This collection has range, variety and contemporary interest and will do much to re-frame debates about historical fiction. It brings together a range of approaches and texts and a group of distinguished critics to offer fresh insight and will make a mark.´ - Linda Anderson, Professor of Modern English and American Literature, Newcastle University, UK

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