Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-22dnz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T16:56:50.055Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“Is This Real?”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2018

Extract

One salutary effect of encountering the often bizarre materials—Leibniz's possible worlds theory, war-games played in Prussian military academies, books about the presidency of Jefferson Davis—that Catherine Gallagher has assembled in Telling It Like It Wasn't is that one obtains a better purchase on the deep weirdness that also informs normal realist novels. That weirdness is central to the realist tradition's historical fictions especially, by virtue of the peculiar manner in which they compound together fictional invention and referentiality and call on readers to traverse the ontological chasms between the two.

Type
Roundtable: Telling It Like It Wasn't, by Catherine Gallagher
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Dannenberg, Hilary P. Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Duncan, Ian. Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Freedgood, Elaine. “Fictional Settlements: Footnotes, Metalepsis, the Colonial Effect.” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 393411.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine. Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Hershinow, Stephanie Insley. “When Experience Matters: Tom Jones and ‘Virtue Rewarded.’Novel: A Forum on Fiction 47, no. 3 (2014): 363–82.Google Scholar
Maxwell, Richard. The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Scott, Sir Walter. Redgauntlet (1824). Edited by Sutherland, Kathryn. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.Google Scholar