Historical novel

Cover of a historical novel based on the life of Queen Elizabeth the Catholic (ilustrated by Luis Labarta, 1900)

The historical novel is a narrative subgenre that took shape in the Romanticism of the 19th century and which has continued to develop quite successfully into the 20th and XXI. Using a fictional plot, like any novel, it has the characteristic that it is located in a specific historical moment and real historical events usually have some relevance in the development of the plot. The presence of historical data in the narrative may have greater or lesser depth. It is also common for these types of novels to have a real or fictional secondary character as their protagonist rather than a real historical one through whom the fiction develops.

Features

Following the work of Louis Maigron Le Roman historique à l'époque romantique (1898), György Lukács (1936) defined the main purpose of the genre as offering a plausible view of the settings, types, and landscapes from a historical period, preferably distant, so that a realistic and even customary worldview of their system of values and beliefs appears. In this type of novels, true facts must be used even if the main characters are invented. Its features would be eight:

• Historical sense of the time
• Revitalization of the past with a realistic projection
• Popular character, understood as the reflection of social reality and the groups that form it
• Preference by characters whose individuality reflects a medium or typical character
• Application to the present day
• Incidence of anachronism that is necessary
• Critical condition constitutive of the genre, since it encloses a conflict between history and fiction, which leads to a new form of novel, the realistic novel, embodied in Lukács in Honoré Balzac.
• It can be a documentary

Unlike the pseudo historical novel of the XVIII century, with a merely moralizing purpose, the historical novel demands from the author At the same time, a great documentary and erudite preparation and a certain narrative ability, since if one or the other was mastered, it would become something else, either fictionalized history or a historical adventure novel, or what the critic Kurt Spang calls illusionist novel (which seeks verisimilistic recreations according to Aristotelian mimesis) and anti-illusionist novel (which does not respect verisimilitude, in the manner of Bertolt Brecht). History can serve as justification or condemnation of the present times, it can be a pure escape or evasion of its problems or, on the contrary, it can reaffirm the political ideology of its author, be it liberal or conservative.

If it is an adventure novel, the invented facts predominate over the story, which is a mere background landscape or pretext for action, as is the case, for example, in most of Alexandre Dumas senior's novels. At the other extreme, the genre is also denatured with what is called fictionalized history, since in it historical facts clearly predominate over fictitious ones, which is what happens, for example, with Hernán Pérez del Pulgar, the one with the Hazañas, an alleged historical novel by Francisco Martínez de la Rosa that fuels the author's disquisitions in such a way that the story becomes just a pretext to expose theories or documents, approaching the genres of biography or essay.

Evolution of the genre

After many previous precedents, the historical novel only finally took shape as a literary genre in the XIX century through Scottish scholar Walter Scott's (1771-1832) twenty novels about the English Middle Ages, the first of which was Waverley (1814); in fact, Scott, who was a great promoter of German Romanticism in England, was inspired by a little-known German author, Benedikte Naubert (1752-1819), who wrote historical narratives featuring minor characters, not heroes. As Lukacs points out, Scott was an impoverished Scottish nobleman who mythologized his social origins as a kind of Don Quixote de la Mancha, something that was not beyond Scott's own considerations. The historical novel was born, then, as an artistic expression of the nationalism of the romantics and their nostalgia in the face of the brutal changes in customs and values imposed by the bourgeois transformation of the world at the transcendental moment of the transition to modernity between the centuries XVIII and XIX. The past is thus configured as a kind of refuge or escape, but, on the other hand, it allows reading in itself a critique of the history of the present, which is why it is common in historical novels to find a double reading or interpretation not only of a bygone age, but of the present age.

This new genre is clearly separated from the moralizing pseudo-historical novel of the XVIII century, whose evolution is perfectly defined by Louis Maigron: al In principle there is an idealist current, which seeks to establish "models" outstanding virtue and is of moral and educational purpose; then progresses to a "realistic" type of pseudo-historical novel; that does not focus on eminent figures and where history is introduced "without ostentation or failure", with some respect for historical truth: the genre learns not to "grotesquely cross-dress" news that discredits it. Then came a "quaint" that introduced one of the essential elements of the genre: local color.

Its ultimate purpose, openly moral and educational, the fact that it is led by heroes, its worldview based on contemporary values, its debatable credibility and its language, which does not respect the time reflected, prevented them from being considered strictly historical novels, as for example Les Incas (1777) by Jean-François Marmontel, in France, or El Rodrigo (1793) by the Franco-Spanish Jesuit Pedro de Montengón. That is why Walter Scott's melancholic literary formula achieved immense success and his influence spread with Romanticism as one of the main authors and symbols of the new aesthetic. Disciples of Walter Scott were, in Scotland itself, Robert Louis Stevenson with The Black Arrow, The Lord of Ballantrae, Kidnapped or its second part, Catriona; The decadentist Walter Pater (Mario, the Epicurean) and other writers of the movement in Europe wrote historical novels. In the United States of America, another disciple of Walter Scott stands out, James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), who wrote The Last of the Mohicans in 1826 and continued with other historical novels about pioneers.

In Spain, the first historical novel in the Scottian mold was Ramiro, Conde de Lucena (1823) by Rafael Húmara y Salamanca, whose prologue is an important document on the genre. They followed Jicotencal (1826), by Félix Mejía, misattributed to other authors and published in his exile from Philadelphia, and, among many others, Ramón López Soler with Los Bandos de Castilla (1830); Sancho Saldaña or El Castellano de Cuéllar (1834) by José de Espronceda, The Doncel of Don Enrique el Doliente by Mariano José de Larra, The Lord of Bembibre (1844) by Enrique Gil y Carrasco and Francisco Navarro Villoslada with Doña Blanca de Navarra (1846) and [[Amaya or the Basques in the century VIII]] (1877) among many others, highlighting especially the 46 historical novels by Benito Pérez Galdós under the general title of National Episodes (1872-1912) and Pío Baroja's 22, already in the XX century, under the from Memoirs of a Man of Action (1913-1935).

In France, they followed the example of Scott Alfred de Vigny (1797-1863), author of the first French historical novel, Cinq-mars (1826), and later Victor Hugo Our Lady of Paris and Alexandre Dumas (father) and his collaborators, who cared above all about the pleasantness of the narrative in works such as The Three Musketeers. Later they cultivated the genre Gustave Flaubert (Salambó), the historical novels composed by Émile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, known as Erckmann-Chatrian, and Anatole France (Thaïs, among others).

In Italy a true masterpiece of the genre arose, I promessi sposi (or The Betrothed, first published in 1823 and later recast in two installments (1840 and 1842) by its own author, Alessandro Manzoni.It narrates life in Milan under the tyrannical Spanish domination during the XVII century, although this argument conceals a critique of Austrian domination over Italy at the time.It was quickly translated into Spanish by Félix Enciso Castrillón and by Juan Nicasio Gallego.Carlo Varese was especially devoted to the genre among many other authors and the works of Cesare were also translated Cantù and Massimo d'Azeglio and, already in the XX century, we must mention among a large number of authors Umberto Eco, which mixes the genres of the philosophical, detective and historical novels in The Name of the Rose and exercises more strict clearly the canons of the genre in his Baudolino. He also wrote notable historical novels Valerio Massimo Manfredi.

In Germany there was already a baroque historical novel (Andreas Heinrich Buchholtz or Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein) and, after the important precursors that were Leonhard Wächter (1762-1837) with works such as Sagen der Vorzeit, 1787, or Benedikte Naubert (1752-1819), with others as popular as Walter de Montbarry and Thekla de Thurn, we have his contemporaries Ignaz Aurel Fessler or Feßler (Attila, King of the Huns, 1794) and August Gottlieb Meissner or Meißer (Spartacus, 1792), not to mention Kotzebue (Ildegerte, 1778) or Wieland (Der goldene Spiegel, 1772). The most successful and widely read were Der Jesuit by Carl Spindler and Agathocles by Caroline Pichler. Herder's philosophy of history, for whom history should constitute aesthetics and science, inspired Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen (1773) and later Hegel's historicist philosophy. It was, however, Achim von Arnim (1781-1831) who first managed to fully unite fiction and history by creating the first modern German historical novel in Die Kronenwächter (1817); those of Willibald Alexis express the Prussian nationalism of Romanticism; Mention should also be made of Wilhelm Hauff's Lichtenstein, the works of Ludwig Tieck and especially Theodor Fontane, who wrote his monumental Before the Storm (1878). The Das Odfeld already belongs to the realist Wilhelm Raabe (1888). In the 20th century the genre adapts to narrative innovations in the work of Alfred Döblin and the German-Jewish Lion Feuchtwanger, and consolidated in the historical novel of exile, the work of such prominent authors as Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Broch or Hermann Kesten, as a response to Nazi ideology. In Flemish Belgium, the historical novel The Lion of Flanders (1838) by Hendrik Conscience (1812-1883) was fundamental in reactivating a language that had fallen into diglossia with respect to French, and continued for almost half a century. Hundred more by the same author.

In Russia, another disciple of Scott, the romantic Aleksandr Pushkin composed notable historical novels in verse and the more orthodox The Captain's Daughter (1836). Another pinnacle of the genre was also written there, the monumental War and Peace by Leo or Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910), an epic about two emperors, Napoleon and Alexander, where the great historical epiphenomena and the daily intrahistory of hundreds of characters. The symbolist Dmitri Merezhkovsky (1861-1945), on the other hand, delved into the conflicting origins of Christianity in The Death of the Gods (1896), about the Emperor Julian the Apostate.

In Poland the historical novel was a very popular genre; it was cultivated in Romanticism by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski and later by Aleksander Glowacki (Pharaoh, in 1897), although the Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz, who composed a trilogy about the XVII formed by By blood and fire (1884) The flood (1886) and Mr. Wolodyjowski (1888). He then continued with The Teutonic Knights (1900), set in the 15th century, and with the something earlier and considered his masterpiece, Quo vadis? (1896) which evokes the beginnings of Christianity in pagan Rome and the first persecution of Christianity, unleashed by Emperor Nero.

Writers of realism were not swayed by the romantic origins of the genre and used it primarily by seeking the early past to explain, document, or otherwise reflect the present. Charles Dickens stands out with Barnaby Rudge (1841) or A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the latter about the French Revolution and its repercussions in Paris and London. Gustave Flaubert (Salambô, 1862, about Cartago) and Benito Pérez Galdós also worked with a cycle of 47 historical novels that he called National Episodes and cover almost the entire recent history of Spanish XIX century.

In the 20th century the success of the historical novel continued. Predilection for the genre was felt by writers such as the Finnish Mika Waltari (Sinuhé, the Egyptian or Marco, the Roman); Robert Graves, ( I, Claudius , Claudius the god, and his wife Messalina , Belisarius , King Jesus ...); Winston Graham, who wrote a dozen Cornish novels in the late 18th century century; Marguerite Yourcenar (Memoirs of Hadrian); Noah Gordon, (The Last Jew); Naguib Mahfouz (Ajenatón the heretic), Umberto Eco (The name of the rose, Baudolino), Valerio Massimo Manfredi, the Spanish Juan Eslava Galán and Arturo Pérez-Reverte and many others who have cultivated the genre on a more occasional basis.

One can also speak of a Spanish-American historical novel that —with the precedents of Enrique Rodríguez Larreta (La gloria de don Ramiro, 1908) and the Argentine Manuel Gálvez— is represented by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier (The Century of Lights or The Kingdom of this World, among others), the Argentine Manuel Mujica Lainez with Bomarzo, El Unicorn and The Beetle, the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez (The General in His Labyrinth, about Simón Bolívar), the Peruvian-Spanish Mario Vargas Llosa (Paradise in the Other Corner, about the Peruvian writer of the XIX century Flora Tristán), the Chilean Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits, about the coup d'état by General Augusto Pinochet), Puerto Ricans Luis López Nieves The Heart of Voltaire and Mayra Santos-Febres Our Lady of the Night, etc.

A particular class of works within the Spanish-American historical novel is the dictator novel, inspired by the precedent of Tirano Banderas by the Galician writer of the generation of '98 Ramón María del Valle-Inclán. The group opens El señor presidente, by the Guatemalan Nobel laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias, and they are followed by The Autumn of the Patriarch, by Gabriel García Márquez, Yo el supremo el, by Augusto Roa Bastos (about Paraguayan dictator Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia), La fiesta del Chivo, by Mario Vargas Llosa (about Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo) and the Mexican-Guatemalan writer Óscar René Cruz Oliva Rafael Carrera: The forgotten president (2009).

The historical novel in Spain and Latin America

Beyond the forerunner of the XV century Pedro de Corral, and Miguel de Cervantes's wish frustrated by death to To write a historical novel about Bernardo del Carpio, it is necessary to consign the pseudo-historical novels of didactic and moral intent by Pedro de Montengón (1745-1824), El Rodrigo (about the loss of Spain by the Visigoths) and Eudoxia. Thus, the first romantic historical novel in Spanish was the one written by Rafael Húmara, Ramiro, Count of Lucena published in Paris in 1823, provided with an important prologue on the genre.

Juan Ignacio Ferreras distinguishes two main types of historical novel in Spain in the XIX century: liberal historical novel and historical novel moderate. From the second the regional historical novel was born; of either of the two, the archaeological novel by Francisco Javier Simonet, Rodrigo Amador de los Ríos, Gregorio González de Valls and J. R. Mélida. Finally, it indicates the genre of the national historical novel or national episode.

Liberal historical novel

In it is intended "the rupture and exaltation of the individual and almost lyrical self". He usually collects the history of Spain with a political vision and of course a critic; it is anti-traditional "because it tries to deny certain institutionalized values and finally narrates a present, contemporary moment, although to do so it takes its points of reference from the historical past". It is critical because it calls into question certain traditionally accepted values and this criticism will be transmitted to the realists and some naturalists of the last quarter of a century. It is undoubtedly the most original and the one that proposes new solutions to narrative art. It produces, as has already been said, the national episode of Benito Pérez Galdós and Pío Baroja, and its preferred themes will become literary topics of the entire bourgeois left: the battle of Villalar, Juan de Padilla, Felipe II and his son Don Carlos, etc.) It will also produce an anti-clerical current and another workerist or populist current.

In this group are Félix Mejía with Jicotencal (1826), a novel published in Philadelphia about the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés that reveals the threat of invasion of the independent republics of Latin America by the Holy Alliance; Patricio de la Escosura with The Count of Candespina (1832), Neither King nor Roque (1835) and The Patriarch of the Valley (1848-1849), where he manages to refer to the evolution of exalted liberalism. Mariano José de Larra with El doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente (1834). José de Espronceda with Sancho Saldaña or the Castilian of Cuéllar. Historical novel of the XIIIth century (1834). José García de Villalta with El coup en vago, tale of the eighteenth century (1834), an anti-Jesuit novel. Eugenio de Ochoa, with El auto de fe (1837), one of the greatest liberal historical novels. Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, with Sab (1841), Espatolino (1844) and Guatimozín, the last emperor of Mexico (1846). Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco with Ernestina (1848) and El Tigre de Maestrazgo (1846-1848). Benito Vicetto Pérez wrote Los hidalgos de Monforte (1851), Rojín Rojel or the page with golden hair (1855) and other titles. Vicente Barrantes y Moreno stands out for Juan de Padilla (1855-1856), prohibited by the ecclesiastical authority.

Moderate historical novel

It is the "pure" historical novel, the one that best embeds itself in European novelistic currents. It is also the most balanced and the richest, provided that it manages to escape political dualism. It is not authentically romantic, since it tries more to recreate a historical universe than to exalt the individualized self: there is, therefore, no rupture or criticism, but rather an exaltation of traditional values; the past offers a refuge to the defeated aristocratic ideology of the Old Regime.

She was the first to appear with Rafael Húmara y Salamanca, with his Ramiro, Conde de Lucena (1823), with a Hispano-Arabic theme. In English Telesforo Trueba y Cossío writes his The Castilian or the Black Prince in Spain. Ramón López Soler specialized in the genre: Los bandos de Castilla o El caballero del Cisne (1830), Henrique de Lorena (1832), El primogenito de Alburquerque (1833), The Cathedral of Seville (1834) and others. Estanislao de Cosca Vayo (or Kotska Bayo) wrote a great novel: The conquest of Valencia by El Cid (1831). Juan Cortada y Sala writes a kind of prose poem that he calls historical romances : Tancredo in Asia (1833) is set in the Crusades; The heiress of San Gumí (1835) is in the Catalan XII century; Also of Catalan history is his The bastard of Entença (1838). Francisco Martínez de la Rosa attempts a monumental historical reconstruction in erudite and documented novels: Doña Isabel de Solís, Queen of Granada (1837-1846), 3 vols., and Hernán Pérez del Pulgar, the one with the feats (1834), a novelized story that is almost a historical novel. Ignacio Pusalgas y Guerris explores the American theme: The Mexican Necromancer (1838) and The White Priest (1839) deal respectively with the conquest of Mexico and Cuba by the Spanish, with parallel stories of love in war. Other authors are Vicente Boix, Tomás Aguiló, Enrique Gil y Carrasco, Pablo Alonso de la Avecilla, Manuel Fernández y González, Víctor Balaguer, Francisco Navarro Villoslada, Antonio Trueba, Isidoro Villaroya, Juan Ariza, Víctor África Bolanguero, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo and many others.

Evolution of the genre in Spanish to the present day

In America, the first historical novel published in Spanish was the anonymous one published in Philadelphia in 1826, Jicotencal, about the subjugation of Tlaxcala by Hernán Cortés to conquer the Aztecs. This work has been attributed to the Cubans Félix Varela and José María de Heredia and also to a triumvirate of Spanish-American exiles in which Heredia would have written the original text, the Ecuadorian Vicente Rocafuerte revised it and Varela delivered it for publication. However, although it was later believed that the authorship of Jicotencal was by the liberal Spanish journalist Félix Mejía, recent research (based on documentation from Columbia University) suggests that the definitive authorship is by the Cordovan doctor Cayetano wool.

There was a slightly earlier historical novel written in English by Spanish emigrants: Vargas (1822), attributed to José María Blanco White; Don Esteban and Sandoval or the Freemason (both from 1826), by Valentín Llanos; or Gómez Arias or the Moors of the Alpujarras (1826) and The Castilian (1829) by Telesforo de Trueba y Cossío.

Much more remembered are the contributions of Mariano José de Larra (1809-1837, El doncel Don Enrique el Doliente) and José de Espronceda (1808-1842, Sancho Saldaña or the Castilian de Cuellar). With El señor de Bembibre (1844), by Enrique Gil y Carrasco, which narrates the love affairs of Álvaro and Beatriz against the backdrop of the extinction of the Order of the Temple, a dream world is recreated and legendary. Amaya or The Basques in the VIII century, by the Carlist writer Francisco Navarro Villoslada also obeys a typically romantic nationalism, while the previous works obey rather the bourgeois nostalgia for the disappearance of the past, linked to the birth of other genres of Romanticism such as the article of customs. Among the authors who cultivated it are Ramón López Soler (1806-1836), Estanislao de Kotska Vayo, Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, Serafín Estébanez Calderón, José Somoza, Eugenio de Ochoa, José María de Andueza, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, José García de Villalta, Patricio de la Escosura, Juan de Dios Mora, Benito Vicetto, Juan Cortada, Víctor Balaguer, Salvador García Bahamonde...

However, the most popular historical novel was the one written in installments by the prolific writer Manuel Fernández y González (1821-1888), who, halfway between Romanticism and Realism, became famous for works consecrated to an audience more fond of sensationalism like His Majesty's Cook, The Death of Cisneros or Miguel de Mañara.

The Realism novelist Luis Coloma felt a special inclination to the genre, to which he offered the works Pequeñeces (1891), about the Madrid Restoration society, Portraits of yesteryear (1895), La reina mártir (1902), El marqués de Mora (1903) and Jeromín (1909), the latter about don John of Austria.

The undoubted peak of the Spanish historical novel is represented by a long series of 46 novels, the National Episodes (1872-1912) by the Realist novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, which cover a large part of the century XIX extending from the Battle of Trafalgar and the Spanish War of Independence to the Restoration and offer a didactic version of the history of Spain of that century contrasting liberal characters and reactionaries.

An almost similar period, but with greater emphasis on the struggles between the liberals and the Carlist and viewed from a more somber and pessimistic point of view, is the one covered by Memoirs of a Man of Action by Pío Baroja, focused on the career of one of his ancestors, the liberal adventurer and conspirator Eugenio de Aviraneta. Between 1913 and 1935, the twenty-two volumes of which it consists appeared, reflecting the most important events in Spanish history of the XIX century, from the War of Independence until the regency of María Cristina, going through the turbulent reign of Fernando VII. Among the two, it is also worth mentioning what, according to the great critic Julio Cejador, is the historical novel "the most classic in substance and form that has been written in Spain and can be seen alongside the best from outside of it", Syncerasto, the parasite, novel of Roman customs (1908), by Eduardo Barriobero. We must also mention Sónnica, the courtesan (1901), by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.

Ramón María del Valle-Inclán approached the genre through two trilogies: The Carlist War, composed of Los cruzados de la causa (1908), The glow of the bonfire (1909) and Gyrfalcons of yesteryear (1909). On the reign of his abhorred Queen Elizabeth II, he composed a second trilogy, El ruedo ibérico, made up of La corte de los milagros (1927), Long live my owner (1928) and Baza de espadas, which appeared posthumously.

During the Franco regime, the Spanish historical novel was limited in an almost monomaniacal way to the subject of the Spanish Civil War. Perhaps the best of these works as regards the side of the victors is that of Agustín de Foxá, Madrid, from the Czech Court, although José María Gironella was more popular with his trilogy Los Cypresses Believe in God, A Million Dead and Peace Has Exploded, among other works, where he examines the conflict through the vicissitudes of a family, the Alvears. This theme was obsessive even among exiled writers (Ramón J. Sender, with his great enealogy Crónica del alba, inspired by his own memories, but which only addresses the Civil War in the last three novels. also in the Civil War his masterpieces Requiem for a Spanish peasant and The seven books of Ariadne and he also assiduously cultivated the historical novel on a matter more distant in time (Mister Witt in the canton, Byzantium, The equinoctial adventure of Lope de Aguirre, The adolescent bandit etc.) Arturo Barea cultivates a prose full of strength and amenity in his trilogy The forging of a rebel, made up of three novels that take place during the author's childhood in Madrid before the Civil War, the Moroccan war and the Civil War; Max Aub with the six novels of the cycle The Magic Labyrinth: Campo Cerrado (1943), Campo de sangre, (1945), Open Field, (1951), Campo del Moro (1963), French Countryside (1965) and Campo de los Almendros (1968), or Manuel Andújar, with his trilogy Vespers and Lares and Penares). Ricardo Fernández de la Reguera and Susana March, published several Episodes Nacionales Contemporáneos, following the idea of Pérez Galdós and focusing on the first third of the century XX. However, outside of this theme, the Spanish postwar period offered an exceptional testimony of a historical novel on the miscegenation of Spaniards and Indians in El corazón de piedra verde (1942) by Salvador de Madariaga.

The democratic restoration meant a revitalization of the genre, which was enriched with a more diverse theme. Authors such as Jesús Fernández Santos began this current with Extramuros (1978) or Cabrera, about the French prisoners of the War of Independence or The Greek, about the Cretan painter El Greco living in Toledo, or like José Esteban, who in El hymno de Riego (1984) reflects the meditations of the author of the Spanish revolution of 1820, Rafael del Riego, hours before of being executed and in La España peregrina (1988) he writes the diary of General José María de Torrijos and reviews the other Spanish liberal émigrés in London from the point of view of José María Blanco White.

José María Merino, on the other hand, wrote a trilogy of historical novels aimed at young audiences between 1986 and 1989 consisting of The gold of dreams, The land of lost time and Las lágrimas del sol, in which he develops the story of the mixed-race adolescent Miguel Villacel Yölotl, the son of a colleague of Cortés and a Mexican Indian woman. Later, some authors devoted themselves especially to the genre, such as Juan Eslava Galán, Terenci Moix, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Antonio Gala or Francisco Umbral. Fernando Savater's contribution was an epistolary novel about one of his hobbies, Voltaire, entitled The Garden of Doubts . Even more veteran authors threw their room to the sword, such as Miguel Delibes, who approached the Inquisition and Spanish Protestantism in the XVI century with the novel The Heretic, or Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, who with Crónica del rey aspamado offered a humorous vision of the Spain of the young King Felipe IV. The historian Santiago Castellanos would be another exponent of the historical novel, specializing in the Roman Empire, highlighting the novels Martyrium: The Twilight of Rome, from 2012, and Barbarus. The Conquest of Rome, 2015.

There was also a historical novel in Catalan, the first example of which is L'orfeneta de menargues (1862) by Antoni de Bofarull. It has a dozen more testimonies between 1862 and 1882. The only common theme that unites all these works, according to his scholar Jordi Tiñena, is "the restoration of order". As for the historical novel in Galician, its first exponent is later than Catalan: A tecedeira de Bonaval (1894), by Antonio López Ferreiro. In Basque, it can be considered a pioneer of the genre Auñemendiko Lorea (1898) by Txomin Agirre.

Current subgenres

Documentary fiction

Related to fictionalized history, in the XX century the variant of documentary fiction was produced; incorporates "not only historical figures and events, but also reports of everyday events" found in contemporary newspapers; for example USA (1938) and Ragtime (1975) by Edgar L. Doctorow.

The fictional biography

Belgian Marguerite Yourcenar wrote the first-person Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), a popular and critically acclaimed success about the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Margaret George has written fictional biographies of historical figures: The Memoirs of Cleopatra (1997) and Mary, called Magdalene (2002). Earlier examples are Count Aleksey Nikolaievich Tolstoy's Peter I (1929–34), and I, Claudius (1934) and King Jesus (1946) by Robert Graves. Other recent biographical novel series include Conn Iggulden's Conqueror and Emperor and Robert Harris' Cicero Trilogy.

The historical mystery

Historical mysteries or historical whodunits are a mixed genre between the criminal or mystery novel and the historical one, and are located by the author in a distant past, although the plot involves the resolution of a mystery or crime (usually murder). Although works that combine these genres have existed since at least the early 1900s, it has become a very important and cultivated genre, with a large number of outstanding works. A new type of character has even been created, the fake "historical detective". Among the writers of this subgenre, Robert van Gulik, Josephine Tey, Lillian de la Torre, Ellis Peters, Paul Doherty, Umberto Eco, Luis García Jambrina, Arturo Pérez Reverte, Lindsey Davis...

The Historic Family Saga

Sometimes an author reconstructs the story of their own ancestors, like Alex Haley. Romantic themes or series of novels describing a family lineage have also been portrayed, as did Winston Graham in his novels set in turn-of-the-century Cornwall XVIII or Isabel Allende in The House of the Spirits. Other authors of this type are Georgette Heyer, a kind of heiress to Jane Austen, Ignacio Agustí with his novels about the Rius family and the Catalan bourgeoisie or Diana Gabaldón with her novels about the Jacobite wars of the XVIII.

Nautical and pirate fiction

Some historical novels explore life at sea: Robert Louis Stevenson was the first with Treasure Island (1883), and Emilio Salgari followed with the Sandokan series > (1895-1913). C. S. Forester wrote novels about Captain Horatio Hornblower, and Patrick O'Brian also put together a novel cycle, among many others.

Alternative history, uchronia or historical fantasy

In this type of narrations, it is about describing a story that could have been and was not, as if it were happening in a divergent or parallel universe. Not to be confused with pseudohistory. In Keith Roberts's Pavane / Pavana (1968) Queen Elizabeth I of England was assassinated in July 1588 and England was conquered by Philip II, becoming a Catholic power; Protestantism has been destroyed, and, as a consequence, an overwhelming Caesaropapism dominates and the industrial revolution has been very late: in the XX century still no gasoline engines or electricity. A different plot is offered by Britain Conquered (2002) by Harry Turtledove. In The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick, the first to devise this type of novel, a different story is described after World War II and a novelist imagines that in reality the allies they won the war; he too has defeated the Axis (although Stalin is still fighting) in Homeland (1992) by Robert Harris. The Plot Against America (2004) is a novel by Philip Roth where Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the 1940 presidential election by Charles Lindbergh and an anti-Semitic fascist establishes the government. Jesús Torbado tested the genre with En el día de hoy, in which the Republic has won the Spanish Civil War or Danza de tinieblas (2005) by Eduardo Vaquerizo, in which Felipe II has passed away, Juan de Austria reigns and Spain has become Protestant. There are many other examples, such as Robert Silverberg's Eternal Rome, in which the Roman Empire survives to this day. Often this is a mixed genre, which crosses the historical novel with utopian, uchronic or dystopian science fiction. And it still has few cinematographic ramifications, as in Inglourious Basterds or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino.

Historical Fiction for Children

A prominent subgenre within historical fiction is the children's historical novel, often with an educational bent. in the Anglo-Saxon sphere, for example, Mildred D. Taylor and Geoffrey Trease, but also in the Hispanic sphere (for example, José María Merino with El oro de sueños, etc.)

Historical Graphic Novels

There are writers-artists who create graphic novels that are historical: 300, for example, by Frank Miller, around the battle of Thermopylae, or the series Age of Bronze by Eric Shanower, which narrates the Trojan War, among many others.