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'‘Some stories are hard to tell’, says the blurb of Jo Jones’ recent book on fiction and the history wars. For a debate that swirls around the limits of history and fiction to get at ‘the truth’, this statement is perhaps truest of all. While the history wars have been characterised by politicised contests over the past, arguing over terminology such as ‘invasion’ and ‘settlement’, ‘commemoration’ and ‘celebration’, it was the contest over ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ that caught historians and fiction writers off-guard. When the novelist Kate Grenville suggested that her book, The Secret River, was able to straddle the polarisation of the history wars because fiction can come to history from the perspective of empathy and imagination, several historians bristled. Rather than being bound by contests over evidence and interpretation, a ‘novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, and say there is another way to understand this’, Grenville insisted. In response, historians such as Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen refused to accept that disciplinary history might be less equipped to understand or interpret the past.' (Introduction)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
- Falling Backwards : Australian Historical Fiction and The History Wars 2018 multi chapter work criticism
