Includes bibliographical references (pages 220-239) and index.

Machine generated contents note: -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Notes on Contributors -- Reading the Represented Past: History and Fiction from 1700 to the Present; K.Mitchell & N.Parsons -- Learning to Read the Past in the Early Historical Novel; A.Stevens -- Temporal Systems in Representations of the Past: Distance, Freedom and Irony in Historical Fiction; H.Dalley -- 'All histories are against you?': Family History, Domestic History and the Feminine Past in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion; M.Spongberg -- Rereading Hogarth and Pope: Authenticity and Academic Fictions of the Eighteenth Century; J.Ward -- 'Panoramic Byron: Reading, History and Pre-cinematic Spectacle; H.Groth -- 'The Painted Record' in George Eliot's Historical Novel Romola; K.Marler-Kennedy -- Reading and Remembering History in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year; N.Parsons -- The Gothic Reader: History, Fear and Trembling; D.Wallace -- Notes towards a Poethics of Spectrality: The Examples of Neo-Victorian Textuality; J.Wolfreys -- Dickens and Ways of Seeing the French Revolution: A Tale of Two Cities; J.Mee -- The Uses of History: The Historical Novel in the Post-French Revolution Debate and Ellis Cornelia Knight's Marcus Flaminius (1792); F.Price -- The Living Past and the Fellowship of Sacrificial Violence in William Morris's A Dream of John Ball; I.Hanson -- Bibliography -- Index.

"This collection of essays that examines historical fiction from the eighteenth century to the present. In doing so, it provides a clear sense of both the shifts and continuities in the way historical recollection, strategies of representation, and reading practices intersect"-- Provided by publisher.