Contenu du sommaire : Fiction historique anglo-américaine

In 1814, Walter Scott publishes Waverley, trying his hand at fiction after having reached fame as a poet. This novel, which narrates the story of the Jacobite rebellion, is the starting point of a long series, commonly known under the generic title of the Waverley Novels. Even though all these texts are independent from one another, they share a common formula that Scott used as the basis for the historical novel that was then reproduced time and again by his contemporaries, including the so-called “American Scott,” James Fenimore Cooper. This paper focuses on the replicability of that formula in the work of these two authors and seeks to show that, when it is replicated and applied to other temporal and geographical contexts, some areas are eventually left uncovered by the predefined frame. In such instances, the text ends up revealing its seams, while trying to smooth them out through the same process. This paper aims at proving that the recipe for the historical novel, as crafted by Scott and taken up by his contemporaries, reveals that this idealized model for a polished national narrative ultimately resists its systematic re-employment.

French historians and novelists praise Walter Scott for coming up with a new way of representing history : the “local colour” and the dramatization of historical issues, embodied by typical historical characters, render history both lively and intelligible, at a time when historical discipline proves to be the melting pot of the nation. We will thus examine the way W. Scott's figure fits in this meeting of a political moment and a romantic poetics.

From the outset in July 1936, the Spanish Civil War attracted international attention; its massive coverage by American journalists and documentarists, the direct commitment of a number of American citizens as well as the long-lasting popularity of war films among the country's film audiences drove the Hollywood studios to take an interest in the conflict. However, how could studio‐produced pictures address the broader ideological battle and the nature of what was at stake in Spain while an ongoing debate over the war was already dividing Americans ? The diverging views expressed within the nation's public opinion and pressure groups as well as among the artists and decision-makers of the film industry, along with the commercial realism and censorship policy which governed the studios, prompted the abandonment of a number of tentative projects and the bowdlerization of motifs deemed controversial.

The first two seasons of Vikings and The Last Kingdom appeared on television in 2013-2014 and 2015-2017 : Vikings is loosely based on medieval Icelandic sagas whereas The Last Kingdom is an adaptation of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories novels. Both series seem obsessed with issues of religion, going as far as to represent the confrontation between Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons as a fundamentally religious struggle. Scandinavian polytheism is generally shown as positive, open and tolerant, while Christian monotheism is depicted as negative, morbid and fanatical. This unnuanced opposition is clearly not derived from current historical literature, but from nineteenth-century “borealist” ideas about the value of Northern European and Germanic cultures, which were then popular in Anglophone countries.

This article seeks to analyse the representations of masculinities in the aftermath of the Great War as foregrounded in two recent British TV series : Peaky Blinders (seasons 1 to 3) and Downton Abbey (seasons 1 and 2). Broadcast around the centenary of the Great War and influenced by different historiographical trends, these series convey competing visions of the war and of the social transformations that followed. By focusing on the representations of male characters we wish to examine how manliness and warlike stereotypes were reconfigured by the conflict and argue that, in the aftermath of the war, violence shifted away from the frontline and thrived at home. Lastly, both series provide an insight into the evolutions of fatherhood and use the family as a way to evoke the whole of British society and the patriarchal system in place.

In this article, Lin-Manuel Miranda's popular musical Hamilton serves as a stepping-stone for a reconsideration of historical thinking about the American past, and an opportunity to critically review the heritage of the American Revolution in both public and academic history. The paper demonstrates how many historians of the Revolution reached an impasse in the 1970s, jettisoning historical approaches that provided a coherent path from past to future and embracing presentism instead. It raises the question of whether Miranda's contribution – a fictitious offering – might encourage the complexity, tension and sense of temporal direction needed to move beyond the current obsession with the present.

Since the start of the 20th century, the South has managed to impose its narrative of the Civil war as well as that of the decades of « Reconstruction », as the popularity of films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) illustrates. This conservative national narrative, which erased the antislavery and truly democratic nature of the period, is currently being challenged. A new and vast historiography of slavery, together with recent films bearing on this question, has played a major role in this realization. But two fantastic films, Jonah Hex (2010) and Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (2012) must also be taken into account, given the cathartic power of their representation of the period which underlines how important the current reversal of perspective is.

The novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeline Miller and Pat Barker are told from the viewpoint of women who were originally background characters and become protagonists. These women writers use feminist social sciences and offer a retelling of famous events which departs from the male-centered narratives. Instead of myths glorifiying the fighting hero, they focus on female servitude and gendered violence while pointing out opportunities for female agency. Fiction serves as a warning againt the bias in ancient source material and push back against the weaponizing of ancient literature by the far-right.

Romance novels produced in the United States participate in the global industry of entertainment, thanks to translation. Bought or borrowed as material books and e-books, romances are downloaded on smart displays, tablets, phones and computers. Historical romance has plots often set in British and Scottish history, above all English Regency. Thus, readers enjoy male and female characters' behaviour facing social injunction of class and gender, making historical romances ‘exotic' to mainly female readers-consumers who experience formal equality between the sexes in the western democratic world. However, this massive consumption of authentic historical facts raises the question of the interaction between fictional and historical writing.

Often introduced as a way of gamifying lessons, the topic of using videogames in teaching practice, and especially Assassin's Creed, is increasingly noticeable in media discussion as well as in the field of research. After a literature review related to the different ways of approaching Ubisoft's action-adventure game, we will look into how that historical videogame fiction is turned into teaching material by history teachers. Studying from the media viewpoint rather than from a gaming angle, we will summarise the de-gamification of Assassin's Creed as it is introduced in class, focusing mainly on the observation of a teaching session in 8th grade.

In this article, we explore the relationship between fiction and history by questioning the denomination "historical" that accompanies the historical TV series The Borgias and Borgia, and history as a cultural concept. From an investigation on two levels, the works and the adaptor-authors, and from the observation that they do not try to represent the past but to evoke it, we question the relationship that the adaptor-authors have with history, by analyzing the way they appropriate it and how they reconfigure it to compose the diegetic and visual universes of the historical TV series.