| In addressing the connection between contemporary attempts to memorialize the past and the tradition of the nineteenth-century historical novel, I argue that the recent theoretical interest in trauma allows us to reconsider the commitment of earlier novels to a progressive vision of national history. Simply put, the traumatic moments of contemporary fiction point to their own pre-history within the novels of the nineteenth century. The works of Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville although often derided for their complicity with the historical narratives of national and imperial progress, provide more than a sympathetic and nostalgic vision of the past: they give a glimpse of the individual and collective traumas that have brought us to the present.; In the first chapter, I examine three contemporary attempts to memorialize the past: the September 11th memorial, James Welch's historical novel Fools Crow, and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Through these examples, I establish the possibilities opened up by traumatic representation. When Walter Scott employs romance as a marker for the unexplainable, or invokes a gothic sense of historical repetition, his vision of history comes closest to this post-modern concept of trauma. In the second chapter, I trace a series of romantic, marginal, and traumatic figures throughout the Waverley Novels. In my third chapter, I explore the continuity and transformation of the historical novel as it moves from a British national, historical, and literary context to an American one. Taking the Leather-Stocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper as my central example, I demonstrate how Cooper adopted and transformed Scott's historical romance so as to come to terms with the central trauma of American history, the genocide of Native Americans. In the fourth chapter, I examine the historical novels of Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, demonstrating how they re-write, and borrow from, their predecessors so as to present their own vision of a national history open to the disruptive possibilities of particular traumas. |
