historical novelist

English

Noun

historical novelist (plural historical novelists)

1. One who writes historical novels.
   • 1822 April 20, “[Review of New Books.] The Lollards; a Tale founded on the Persecutions which marked the early part of the Fifteenth Century. […]”, in The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review; […], volume IV, number 153, London, page 244, column 2:

     […] the actual manners, customs, and peculiarities of some ages are illustrated and explained, and, though real personages are introduced, they are not clothed with fictions inconsistent or at variance with their real character. / In the class of those who have been most successful as historical novelists, we would rank the author of the ‘Lollards.’ It is true that his ‘Calthorpe’ was a work of mere fiction, but of fiction so nearly allied to nature, that we could confidently say, if the events did not happen, they might have happened.

   • 1999, Michael Petracca, The Graceful Lie: A Method for Making Fiction, Prentice Hall, →ISBN:

     Historical novelists usually create a language for their characters that suggests the period without reproducing it in its archaic fullness.

   • 2008, J. E. Smyth, “Classical Hollywood and the Filmic Writing of Interracial History, 1931–1939”, in Mary Beltrán, Camilla Fojas, editors, Mixed Race Hollywood, New York, N.Y., London: New York University Press, →ISBN, part I (Miscegenation: Mixed Race and the Imagined Nation), page 39:

     Hervey Allen, one of the most popular historical novelists of the last century, had this to say of the distinction between historiography and historical fiction: “Neither historian nor novelist can reproduce the real past,” but historical novelists can give “the reader a more vivid, adequate, and significant apprehension of past epochs than does the historian.”

Further reading

• List of historical novelists on Wikipedia.Wikipedia