Historical Genre Fiction
ORGANIZER: Rosemary Erickson Johnsen
Governors State Univ., johnsenr@msu.edu

CHAIR: Rob Franciosi
Grand Valley State University
francior@gvsu.edu

PAPER #1: “Of Kings and Commoners: Writing Fictional Case Studies for the History Classroom”
AUTHOR James R. Wright, Triton College, jwright@triton.edu

Complementing standard textbooks on Western Civilization, undergraduates are introduced to a fictionalized, open-ended case method. One of my 
supplemental texts, “Prophets, Kings, Commoners, and Outcasts,” presents eleven stories covering the time period between pre-history to the 
reformation. Each story provides students with an understanding of the people, their culture, and the time in which they lived. As the students begin to 
read, they soon find themselves caught up in the characters and the events of the story. In the end, they discover that they must put themselves into the 
place of the main character and make a critical decision. Students soon learn each decision presents a unique set of problems and consequences. As 
students work their way through the story to a solution, they are more able to appreciate the complexity of this historical period of the time. Each case 
story is approximately 15 to 20 pages in length, and concludes without an ending, requiring students to complete the story. By completing the stories, 
students increase their critical thinking skills as well as gain an entirely new appreciation for the period of time in which the story is set. These 
fictionalized narratives illustrate social context and political environment in ways that standard textbooks cannot. 

PAPER #2: “The Legacy of An American Tragedy: From Children’s Lit to High Opera”
AUTHOR Rosemary Erickson Johnsen, Governors State Univ., johnsenr@msu.edu

Readers expect historical fiction to be informed by history and other non-fictional sources, but in the Chester Gillette-Grace Brown murder case of 1906, a fictional re-telling casts the longest shadow. Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel, An American Tragedy, is a noticeably interpretative presentation of the case, yet it dominates subsequent treatments of the true-crime story. The novel’s role in drawing attention to the case is undisputed. A Place in the Sun, the 1951 film starring Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters, and Elizabeth Taylor, is based on Dreiser’s novel and pushes the interpretation even farther in favor of the killer than Dreiser did. Two historical studies published in the 1980s, Craig Brandon’s Murder in the Adirondacks: “An American Tragedy” Revisited and Brownell and Enos’ Adirondack Tragedy: The Gillette Murder Case of 1906, feel obliged to take account of Dreiser’s presentation of the story. One contemporary fictional re-telling of the case, Jennifer Donnelly’s young adult novel A Northern Light, deliberately excludes Dreiser from an extensive bibliography, drawing attention to historical fiction’s unwillingness to admit reliance on other fictional sources—but also making Dreiser’s novel conspicuous by its absence. Most recently, the 2005 opera, An American Tragedy, draws openly on Dreiser but tries to do him better through such devices as moving the time frame to that of the original crime rather than Dreiser’s contemporary setting. My paper examines the legacy of Dreiser’s novel as it influences later presentations in a variety of genres, from high to low.

PAPER #3: “Comedic Historical Fiction: Over-the-Topical Adventures in Empire”
AUTHOR Jo Ellyn Clarey, Independent Scholar, joellynclarey@yahoo.com

 
In Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture (2004), Caroline Reitz argues that conventional formulations of detective 
fiction as domestic, “particularly distinct and homogeneous” narratives offering readers distraction rather than participation in the tides of history have 
prevented us recognizing its originary texts’ profound collaboration with other nineteenth-century discourses, in particular imperial adventure stories. 
Reitz’s perceptive yoking of detective and imperial fictions, and her elaborate reconception of their role in the reimagination of Victorian national identity 
throughout the course of the century, can be reinvested in an examination of contemporary fictions that intersect these two subgenres, however much 
critical opinion continues to see them as “distinct and homogeneous.” Exploiting their original settings, many earnest popular novels set their
 exploring/detecting characters on Victorian imperial stages to engage in unfinished business, as A.S. Byatt has suggested. These series fictions unmask
 their foundational models’ ideologies, reschool contemporary readers still swamped in insular historiography, then often remask their own interventions 
into contemporary culture. But historical parallels to topical events have since 2001 become increasingly overt—especially in comic satires spoofing the 
very narrative forms they inhabit. Indeed, political commentary threatens to sink fictional form in the most recent comic romps of Elizabeth Peters’ 
Egyptologists and the outrageous debunkings of George MacDonald Fraser’s poltroon Flashman. There is no escaping contemporary tides for readers 
of these historical fictions.