Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction, 2014

This collection of essays is dedicated to examining the recent literary phenomenon of the 'neo-historical' novel, a sub-genre of contemporary historical fiction which critically re-imagines specific periods of history.

Introduction: Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction; Elodie Rousselot PART I: EXOTICIZING THE HISTORICAL OTHER 1. Exoticizing the Tudors: Hilary Mantel's Re-Appropriation of the Past in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies ; Rosario Arias 2. Exoticizing Colonial History: British Authors' Australian Convict Novels; Therese-M. Meyer 3. Exoticism and Consumption in Anne Enright's The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch ; Maeve Tynan 4. 'We were again on the trail of cannibals': Consuming Trauma and Frustrating Exoticism in Robert Edric's The Book of the Heathen ; Emily Scott 5. 'It's like gold leaf, and now it's rising, peeling away': Britishness and Exoticism in Sarah Waters's The Night Watch ; Elsa Cavalié PART II: EXOTIC FASCINATION / NEO-HISTORICAL SUBVERSION 6. Cannibalising the Other: David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and the Incorporation of 'Exotic' Pasts; Gerd Bayer 7. Neo-Victorian Experiments with (Natural) History in Harry Karlinsky's The Evolution of Inanimate Objects ; Elodie Rousselot 8. 'Who Do You Think You Are Kidding?': The Retrieval of the Second World War in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day and Ian McEwan's Atonement ; Nick Bentley 9. Beasts of Burdened Memories: Exotic Figures in Michael Chabon's Neo- Historical Holocaust Fiction; Mia Spiro 10. 'A History of Darkness': Exoticizing Strategies and the Nigerian Civil War in Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Amy S. Rushton Index

Rosario Arias, University of Málaga, Spain Gerd Bayer, Erlangen University, Germany Nick Bentley, University of Keele, UK Elsa Cavalié, University of Toulouse, France Therese-M. Meyer, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany Amy S. Rushton, University of Manchester, UK Emily Scott, University of Portsmouth, UK Mia Spiro, University of Glasgow, UK Maeve Tynan, Independent Scholar, Ireland