Historical Fictions/Identities - Call for Papers
From popular television ( The Tudors , Reign , Outlander , Vikings etc) to Booker-prize winners (Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies ), film ( The Handmaiden , The Young Victoria ), video games ( Assassin’s Creed franchise, Civilization The Legend of Sword and Fairy ) and more, historical fictions are a significant part of twenty-first century culture. Contemporary audiences engage with the past as entertainment more than they engage with it through education. Historical fictions reveal more about the time in which they were produced than they do about the period that they represent. This symposium aims to explore the cultural work done around identities in the twenty-first century by fictionalised pasts. How do we make who we are now by re-making the past? Which identities are included and excluded from narratives of particular periods? What present identities are projected back into, for example, ancient Rome, the European Middle Ages, eighteenth-century Japan