Reading the represented past: History and fiction from 1700 to the present

When the Institute of Historical Research (UK) held its annual conference for 2011 on the topic of historical fiction, involving academic and public historians as well as historical novelists and publishers (though notably not literary critics), public demand for access was so great that the organisers developed a website in order to host a ‘virtual’ conference only a few days later. The conference, entitled ‘Novel Approaches’, probed a number of questions relating to the relationship between academic history and historical fiction, including how the two fields might be differentiated, how firm the boundary is between them, and whether the genre of historical fiction has become ‘respectable’. None of these questions are new; all have been the subject of popular and academic debate at least since the eighteenth century and yet they continue to be the focus of energetic discussion.