New Directions in Contemporary Women's Historical Fiction

Abstract

As writers and readers look to the past to make sense of the turbulence and uncertainty of the contemporary moment, the genre of historical fiction is booming. Historical novels by women writers have the potential to unearth overlooked and oppressed subjectivities in order to counter and challenge heteropatriarchal and cisnormative official histories by considering how gender intersects with race, class, migration status, disability or sexuality, for example. This intervention calls for a repositioning of the field of historical fiction studies, demonstrating how intersectional, transnational, multilingual and decolonial feminist approaches to the analysis of contemporary women-authored historical fictions from and about diverse linguistic and cultural contexts can defy the traditionally patriarchal, monolingual and ‘Global North’ focus of scholarship on the genre.