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historical novel, a novel that has as its setting a period of history and that attempts to convey the spirit, manners, and social conditions of a past age with realistic detail and fidelity (which is in some cases only apparent fidelity) to historical fact. The work may deal with actual historical personages, as does Robert Graves’s I, Claudius (1934), or it may contain a mixture of fictional and historical characters. It may focus on a single historic event, as does Franz Werfel’s Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1934), which dramatizes the defense of an Armenian stronghold. More often it attempts to portray a broader view of a past society in which great events are reflected by their impact on the private lives of fictional individuals. Since the appearance of the first historical novel, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), this type of fiction has remained popular. Though some historical novels, such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–69), are of the highest artistic quality, many of them are written to mediocre standards. One type of historical novel is the purely escapist costume romance, which, making no pretense to historicity, uses a setting in the past to lend credence to improbable characters and adventures.


Key People: Winston Churchill Victor Hugo Xenophon Aleksandr Pushkin Sir Walter Scott
Related Topics: genre
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Thomas B. Costain
American writer
Alternate titles: Thomas Bertram Costain
By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica • Edit History
Thomas B. Costain, in full Thomas Bertram Costain, (born May 8, 1885, Brantford, Ontario, Canada—died October 8, 1965, New York, New York, U.S.), Canadian-born American historical novelist.


Costain, Thomas B.
Costain, Thomas B.
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Born: May 8, 1885 Brantford Canada
Died: October 8, 1965 (aged 80) New York City New York
Notable Works: “For My Great Folly ” “The Black Rose ” “The Silver Chalice ”
A journalist for many years on Canadian newspapers and a Saturday Evening Post editor (1920–34), Costain was 57 when he published his first romance, For My Great Folly (1942), dealing with the 17th-century rivalry between England and Spain. An immediate success, it was followed almost yearly by historical adventure tales, the best known of which are The Black Rose (1945), whose medieval English hero ranges as far as Kublai Khan’s China, and The Silver Chalice (1952), about the early Christians in Rome.

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fashionable novel
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fashionable novel
literary subgenre
Alternate titles: “silver-fork” novel
By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica • Edit History
fashionable novel, early 19th-century subgenre of the comedy of manners portraying the English upper class, usually by members of that class. One author particularly known for his fashionable novels was Theodore Hook.


Related Topics: novel comedy of manners