Dreams of Things That Never Were: Authenticity and Genre

In Chapter 4, our discussion of authenticity in historical texts for children centred on the concept of anachronism. In considering a number of works set in the six centuries following the Norman Conquest, we found that defining writers’ obligations simply in terms of fidelity to the material and mental realities of the past, as advocated by Rebecca Barnhouse, did not provide adequately for the complex demands inevitably made on texts, not least in terms of accessibility to modern readers. A further limitation of her model, to which we have so far alluded only briefly, is that it does not take account of the ways in which historical considerations intersect with those of genre. Although the subtitle of Barnhouse’s book refers in a general way to ‘young adult literature’, in practice she confines her analysis to realist historical fiction, her preference being for texts featuring plausible and representative characters and events. Where she acknowledges the existence of other genres it is largely to set up a cordon sanitaire between them and realist history. For example, although Barnhouse devotes a chapter of her book to fiction set in medievalesque fantasy worlds, her emphasis is on distinguishing such texts from realist historical fiction and deprecating those critics who confuse the two, rather than on what fantasies may actually be doing with historical material; and she entirely ignores the more difficult case of historical fantasy set in our own world. As became clear in our discussion of I, Coriander , however, genre has a profound effect on the ways in which texts and their relationships to history are read. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.