AustLit

As a silent rule, historians do not mess with creative writers, but it a fact that works like Umberto Eco's best selling The Name of the Rose (1980) appeal to the essence and scope of narrating the past. Likewise, a host of modern and postmodern authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago, Doris Lessing or Patrick White have opened new frontiers in historical fiction, submerging fact with invention, often disproving official historical evidence. The advent of anti-idealism in many fields of the humanities has also downsized history from indisputable, factual eyewitness to an elaborate, time-constrained, and often reticent account. Reliability and faithfulness have ceased to be the purpose of historical fiction and, to be true, what is at stake is not only the process of fictionalising history, but also the transmission of historical events as a distinct kind of narrative.' (Introduction)