Indeed, in 1991, Fredric Jameson declared that ‘the historical novel can no longer set out to represent the historical past it can only “represent” our ideas and stereotypes about that past (which thereby becomes pop history)’ (Jameson 25). We are talking here of new trends in the historical novels, distinct from Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction and its disruptive narrative strategies, marked by distance, irony, parody and pastiche. It is thus said of Hilary Mantel who won the Man Booker Prize twice, in 2009 and in 2012, with historical novels centred on the figure of Thomas Cromwell, that she ‘ rereads and reinvents the genre . . .’ (Hanson 23 emphasis added). However, just as one cannot step into the same river twice, the re-birth of the historical novel is necessarily accompanied by changes and takes new forms. As Jerome De Groot boldly asserts at the very beginning of his overview of the historical novel 1980-2018, ‘It could be argued that the British historical novel is the most important, influential and enduring literary genre of the last thirty-five years’ (De Groot 2019, 169). 1Ģ Having said that, it is undeniably true that, since the 1980s, there has been a marked resurgence of history in English fiction. However, in her response to Anderson’s essay, Diana Wallace shows that historical fiction never disappeared and was always practised by women but that no attention was paid to it and that until recently, women’s novels were excluded from discussion of the genre (starting with Lukacs who only discusses novels by male authors). There are indeed many articles and books about the rebirth or revival of historical fiction: Joseph Brooker called his 2015 article ‘ Reanimating Historical Fiction’ (emphasis added), a position also defended by Perry Anderson in 2011. 1 ‘The historical novel did not become a ‘recessive form’ after the First World War as Anderson claim (.)ġ I must start with a comment on the title of this article-‘Reviving historical fiction’-which might imply that historical fiction was dead before.Afin d’examiner la mise en tension de la prétention à l’authenticité et de l’auto-réfléxivité au coeur du roman, cet article examine d’abord le point de vue choisi pour représenter la guerre, celui des femmes en marge des batailles, puis étudie l’assemblage peu commun de stratégies narratives pour reconstruire le passé : d’une part, l’utilisation de la technique de récits alternatifs et d’autre part, l’emphase sur l’affect et les sens qui ensemble contribuent à renouveler le roman historique. Life after Life englobe les deux guerres mondiales par le biais des vies d’Ursula Todd et de sa famille et poursuit de façon idiosyncratique le propos traditionnel du roman historique de créer une forme d’empathie entre hier et aujourd’hui (De Groot 2010, 27), combinant paradoxalement distance et immersion du lecteur. In order to explore this unresolved tension between a claim to exactness and accuracy coupled with self-consciousness, this article initially discusses the chosen perspective on the war, here seen from the margins as the focus is on the women of the Todd family, then examines the unusual combination of narrative strategies at work to reconstruct the past: first, the use of the forking-path narrative technique and second, the emphasis on affect and the senses that together contribute to renewing the historical novel.Ĭet article propose une lecture de Life after Life (2013) de Kate Atkinson comme fiction historique contemporaine qui consiste à représenter le passé de façon réaliste sans oublier toutefois les leçons du postmodernisme. Encompassing the two world wars through the lives of Ursula Todd and her family, Life After Life pursues the traditional aim of historical fiction to create “a living empathy, a live connection between then and now” (De Groot 2010, 27) but this is achieved in an uncommon way: through a combination of distance and a form of immersion. This article reads Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life ( 2013) as part of a trend in contemporary British fiction that represents the past realistically without dismissing the lessons of postmodernism.