Exoticizing the Past in Contemporary Neo-Historical Fiction (eBook)

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

Cover 1
Half-Title 2
Series 3
Title 4
Copyright 5
Dedication 6
Contents 8
Notes on Contributors 10
Introduction: Exoticising the Past in Contemporary Neo- Historical Fiction 13
Part I Exoticising the Historical Other 29
1 Exoticising the Tudors: Hilary Mantel’s Re- Appropriation of the Past in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies 30
2 Exoticising Colonial History: British Authors’ Australian Convict Novels 48
3 Exoticism and Consumption in Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch 66
4 ‘We were again on the trail of cannibals’: Consuming Trauma and Frustrating Exoticism in Robert Edric’s The Book of the Heathen 80
5 ‘It’s like gold leaf, and now it’s rising, peeling away’: Britishness and Exoticism in Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch 95
Part II Exotic Fascination / Neo- Historical Subversion 112
6 Cannibalising the Other: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and the Incorporation of ‘Exotic’ Pasts 113
7 Neo- Victorian Experiments with (Natural) History in Harry Karlinsky’s The Evolution of Inanimate Objects 130
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 148
9 Beasts of Burdened Memories: Exotic Figures in Michael Chabon’s Neo- Historical Holocaust Fiction 170
10 ‘A History of Darkness’: Exoticising Strategies and the Nigerian Civil War in Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 188
Index 206