Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon by Alexander Manshel (review)

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• Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon by Alexander Manshel
• Hardeep Sidhu

MANSHEL, ALEXANDER. Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 352 pp. $35.00 paperback; $140.00 hardcover; $34.99 e-book.

For much of the twentieth century, the genre of the historical novel didn’t rank high in literary esteem. The popular form was part of a previous era’s paraliterature, “condemned,” Henry James once wrote, to a “fatal cheapness” (qtd. in Manshel 16–17). Alexander Manshel’s Writing Backwards tells the fascinating story of how historical fiction has now become the most prized mode in American letters. Consider the numbers: Of contemporary novels taught in American universities, 70 percent are historical fiction. Around three-quarters of novels shortlisted for major American literary prizes in recent decades are historical fiction (4). Historical fiction earns 50 percent more scholarly citations than do novels set in the present (250n10). While most popular fiction continues to be set in the present, the fiction that elite cultural institutions consecrate as literary is overwhelmingly set in the past (253n32). “[H]istorical fiction,” writes Manshel, “now stands at the very center of the American literary canon” (5).

Writing Backwards is an excellent addition to theorizations of the historical novel, from Walter Scott and Georg Lukàcs up through Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, and Amy Elias. However, Manshel’s idea of what constitutes historical fiction is much roomier than these writers’, more a “literary mode” than a “single, monolithic genre” (12). Instead of ticking boxes to see if novels belong, Manshel uses a common-sense criterion that spans genres: is a novel clearly set in the past? There are some risks to this approach. As the set of objects of study grows, so do the anomalies that undercut generalizations. And when we redefine historical fiction in this way, more of the literature of previous eras (Henry James’s era, say) should now qualify, which in turn [End Page 212] raises the question of how sharp Manshel’s “historical turn” really is. For the most part, Manshel’s data go back only to 1950 or so, making it hard to know the longer-term baseline of historical fiction as a share of the literary field. Some of Manshel’s earliest data show that, from 1950 to 1979, historical fiction made up half of novels shortlisted for major prizes (4)—not as many as today, but still a significant proportion. Moreover, even a cursory glance at earlier literary history shows that Manshel’s broadly conceived “mode” of historical fiction—including most of the subgenres analyzed in Writing Backwards—has always been meaningfully present in the canon. But it’s also true that genre-specific studies and literary histories can too easily become mired in tedious taxonomizing and periodizing. Whatever the long-term shifts in the field are, Manshel has identified an undeniable phenomenon: Novels about contemporary life are not nearly as acclaimed as novels about the past. And Writing Backwards offers a vital account of how this came to be.

Writing Backwards isn’t a narrow genre study for specialists alone. It surveys a majority of the contemporary American canon. Even though the corpus here is big and varied, clear trends emerge through Manshel’s incisive readings of emblematic texts. Traumatic history—of enslavement, migration, and war—is a frequent subject, as is the multigenerational aftermath of such history (Toni Morrison’s Beloved [1987] is the urtext here; Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing [2017] is a more recent example). Ditching the “indefinite present” setting of much contemporary realism (210), these novels knowingly “historicize themselves” with temporal markers or era-specific references (16) (e.g., Ben Lerner and Ruth Ozeki’s novels of the recent past). They are often self-reflexive and meta-canonical (e.g., Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer [2015]). In a departure from the deep skepticism of postmodernist historical novelists, recent writers have taken on an intensely earnest, even reverential, project of historical recuperation. (Think of the yawning tonal gulf between Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 [1961] and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See [2014].) Building...