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The chapter discusses how historical romance emerged. Eighteenth-century fiction was mostly focused on the relationship between the gentry and other social classes. This chapter provides an analysis of the works of Disraeli, Scott, and the other authors to explore the interplay of relationships among different characters that represent the social classes and their differences and similarities of ideas in terms of their belief in Romantic Toryism.

This chapter reviews some aspects of Scott's fiction, specifically its historical perspective and accuracy, and discusses the concept of the romance of disinterested virtue, as well as Scott's representations of the triumph of virtue. It then identifies certain developments in nineteenth-century culture that affected Scott's romance fiction, and ends by determining that Scott's contradictory historical romance should be more of a complicated response to uncertain times instead of a retreat into nostalgia.

This chapter advances a new understanding of the historical romance as a medium for constituting the people via the readerly experience of enchantment. The motif of vanishing in the revolutionary romance, a generic subcategory, signals the absent historical present and the related challenge of representing the people in process. Contrary to a long tradition of literary criticism, the chapter argues that the genre of historical romance seeks to trace out the historical present amid lived conditions of uncertainty. In William Austin’s “Peter Rugg, the Missing Man” (1824) and Catharine Sedgwick’s The Linwoods (1835), two different forms of enchantment (supernatural and affective; the latter is The Linwood’s version of eros) serve as diagnostics on the present, as does the genre’s simultaneous prediction of the future and recreation of the past.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, venues such as the North American Review repeatedly called for a writer who could do justice to the nation through literature. It was not until Walter Scott’s publications travelled across the Atlantic that American writers had the language and landscape to produce a fundamentally national literature in the historical romance. Only through the innovations of the Scottish writer did the hemispheric energies, which remain on the surface of the gothic and popular forms, assimilate into the regionalist energies of the historical romance and its more overtly national impulses. In some ways, Walter Scott’s fiction and its circulation in the United States created the conditions of possibility for the literary nationalism that critics of the time eagerly cried out for. His fictions mapped out a new kind of romance in which the long arc of history culminated in the nation’s contemporary moment.

This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.

This chapter examines the ways early nineteenth century authors framed piracy as an instrument of state growth, anti-colonial resistance, as well as a rationale for imperial expansion and intervention in the Americas in William Gilmore Simms’s The Yemassee (1835), John Brougham’s 1857 play Columbus, El Filibustero!, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover: A Tale (1829) and The Water Witch; or, The Skimmer of the Seas (1830), as well as El Filibustero: Novela Historica (1864), written by Yucatec author Eligio Ancona. In a climate of rapid national expansion, nineteenth century authors used the pirate as a central character to plot national(ist) narratives. Given piracy’s relationship to both state-building and anti-colonial enterprises, as well as piracy’s capacity to both facilitate and threaten property ownership, piracy helps us understand the radical and repressive regimes of American power. The historical novels examined in this chapter are interested in the shadowy origins of the American nation-state, as much as they are with the potentially conflicted present and future of these nation-states.

Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ostensibly extended American citizenship to the Mexican landed class at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and ensured their property rights despite the transfer of land to the U.S., they were nonetheless stripped of formal claims to their property and forced to enter into lengthy and costly legal battles to regain possession of these ranches. Hidalgos had to compete with Anglo agricultural settlers (or squatters), as well as with the railroad barons looking to expand railways in the newly annexed territories. Women are able to best navigate the unstable political economy of the borderlands through the act of squatting, understood broadly to mean the settlement of “unoccupied” land. Read alongside the significant historical events including various land laws and pre-emption acts of the mid-nineteenth century, hidalgo women perform forms of ownership that upend the racialized and gendered logics of citizenship, and the intimate ties between property and rights. The Squatter and the Don recasts the “problem” of Mexican land occupation as U.S. anxiety over territorial expansion and colonization made more complex by the presence of differently racialized populations along the borderlands.

This essay argues that William Godwin's theory of historical romance may be placed in productive dialogue with Michel Foucault's influential preference for Nietzschean 'genealogy' over conventional history. For both, a narrative capable of unfolding the motive forces of history will necessarily be dispersed, contingent and fragmentary. This line of genealogical Gothic is traceable from Godwin through Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in England, and through Charles Brockden Brown and Herman Melville in America. In genealogical Gothic, history is expressed as trauma, as an originating event that leads to haunting and repetition experienced by the sufferer as (to use Melville's term) 'tranced grief'. These narratives may be contrasted with Walter Scott's versions of the historical romance, which look to narrate some kind of historical resolution to the conflicts of the past. In this respect, genealogical Gothic relates to Scott as New Historicism does to grand narratives.

This chapter examines Mark Twain's imagined encounter with modernized Chinese missionaries to the United States by reading his writings alongside the antiracist and anti-imperialist discourses produced by two Chinese diasporic writers, Yung Wing and Wong Chin Foo. It first analyzes Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court as both a satire of specific instances of Western imperialism (including in China) and a critical engagement with the emergent genre of historical romance. It then juxtaposes A Connecticut Yankee with two instances of Chinese modernization: Yung Wing's Chinese Educational Mission and Wong Chin Foo's novel Wu Chih Tien. It argues that Twain's long-standing interest in China's relations with the United States provides significant points of reference for A Connecticut Yankee's critical representations of colonial governance and education.

This chapter uses Edward P. Jones' The Known World—a twenty-first-century novel about slave ownership among African Americans—as a launching pad in discussing the possibilities of historical totality. It questions whether the absences inherent to archival practices concerning slaveholding in the Americas constitute an obstacle to the possibility of totality. Due to its perception of a way across the gaps of the historical record, the chapter locates resources in the African American historical romance, whose emphasis on human relationships resists the overcomplication of historical truth known as reification. In this way, the historical romance finds the necessity of speculation about the past not only an obstacle but a positive gain.

This chapter focuses on the Revolutionary novel written between 1820 and 1850, with emphasis on its “supplemental” relation to the American historical romance and to literary nationalism. As a genre, Revolutionary novels countered the national narrative of progress with local stories that served as reminders of the nation’s fragmented and conflicted Revolutionary past. They used the American Revolution to negotiate the complex and various historical legacies of the individual states, while giving literary form to the very wounds of history that literary nationalists attempted to deny or ignore as sectional conflicts gradually led the country toward the Civil War. The Revolutionary novel tackled mourning and loss as opposed to the optimism of national progress. It also personified historical ruin, as exemplified by works such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821) and John Neal’s Seventy-Six (1823).

This essay reads The Book of Mormon as productive of a structure of mourning, spoken through and effected by the historical romance. It considers not only how individuals come together in religious and national groups, but also the important role that textual artifacts play in those social identifications. The essay identifies shared concerns in structure, topic, and trope between this religious text and the exceedingly popular historical romance that circulated at the same time. The Book of Mormon imbues the American landscape with an antique grandeur, calling upon the contemporary reader to mourn for the communities it describes. But even as the reader volunteers identification by mourning, he or she already has been spoken into the text by the prophets. The romantic structure of prophecy in The Book of Mormon, this essay argues, foretells the reader, thus making of the postrevolutionary subject a historical inevitability emanating from the land itself.

The conclusion proposes an alternative to historicism informed by the growing body of work in nineteenth-century American time studies. New approaches need to explore temporalities and temporal frameworks different from the standard linear chronology employed in historicist criticism. Drawing on Catharine Sedgwick’s The Linwoods, the conclusion advances one such temporal framework (future-passing) and a complementary mode of reading (anticipatory reading) as directions for historicist revisionism. Both future-passing and anticipatory reading emerge from the genre of historical romance, offering possibilities for genre study, and more ambitiously, for literary history.

This chapter focuses on American bestsellers published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with particular emphasis on the distinction between “bestselling novels” and novels that sell a lot of copies. It first provides a historical background on the role of the bestseller in print culture before discussing the factors that turn a novel into a bestseller, along with the blurring of the distinction between sentimentalism and historical romance. It then considers novels that embrace topical controversies, especially those involving social debates, together with two main ideologies that provided structural support for bestselling novels during the period: sentimentalism and evolution. The chapter also examines the Western as a bestselling genre. Finally, it cites some examples of bestselling novels, including James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Mary Johnston's To Have and to Hold (1900), Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936).

This chapter offers a reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 historical fiction The Scarlet Letter: A Romance. It first considers Henry James’s opinion of The Scarlet Letter before discussing the “American” qualities attached to the novel and the darkness associated with its appeal. It then examines why The Scarlet Letter has become a great piece of American literature despite its themes of sinfulness, law, and unjust punishment. It also analyzes Hawthorne’s decision to take on the challenge of writing the historical romance before concluding with an assessment of criticisms against Hawthorne’s morality and politics.