I like the idea of Hannah's slipping into a 'tabby suit' - very Andrew Lloyd Webber!
A lot depends on intention, as you say. While one can't hold books responsible for what reviewers may gushingly claim about their diligent historical research, I do think that if a book includes an Appendix and/or footnotes making claims for its painstaking recreation of another world (as so many historical novels in effect do), then that has to be followed through beyond the material aspects of life into the mentalite. You don't need to be a paid-up annaliste to believe that one flows in pretty fundamental ways from the other.
'Relevance' is the motivation for ignoring this, of course; but then, if relevance is all, what (other than the possibilities for metaphor and allegory, which 'relate' to the present in quite a different way) is the appeal of historical fiction, which is almost by definition the fiction of lives quite different from our own?
no subject
A lot depends on intention, as you say. While one can't hold books responsible for what reviewers may gushingly claim about their diligent historical research, I do think that if a book includes an Appendix and/or footnotes making claims for its painstaking recreation of another world (as so many historical novels in effect do), then that has to be followed through beyond the material aspects of life into the mentalite. You don't need to be a paid-up annaliste to believe that one flows in pretty fundamental ways from the other.
'Relevance' is the motivation for ignoring this, of course; but then, if relevance is all, what (other than the possibilities for metaphor and allegory, which 'relate' to the present in quite a different way) is the appeal of historical fiction, which is almost by definition the fiction of lives quite different from our own?
More questions than comments - sorry!