Plotting the past

Miriam Burstein is reading novels about Anne Boleyn, and she is writing down some thoughts about the relationship between historical fiction and the history that allegedly undergirds it:

So far, all of the novels have imposed some very twentieth-century notions about marriage for love, public vs. private behavior, and domestic space as an ideally depoliticized "private sphere" on sixteenth-century maneuverings that firmly resist any such scripts. I'm not an early modernist, but I cannot see how Henry VIII's married life can be rewritten as a "private" affair; all of his machinations in that area make hash of our own public/private distinctions.

| Posted by Wilson at 8:34 Central | TrackBack
| Report submitted to the Humanities Desk