Cirrus@Austlit

'This is a study of how a group of authors of historical fiction in English achieve a balance between the demands of fiction writing and of medieval history. Twenty-two writers from the UK, the US, Canada and Australia responded to questions aimed at elucidating their relationship with their writing, their audiences and with the past. All the writers are professionally published. Most of them are loosely classifiable as 'genre' writers.'

'The responses demonstrated that the historical knowledge of fiction writers tends to be interpreted through the genre the writer chooses for his or her writing. This has interesting implications for the acceptance of works written out of love by publishers supposedly interested more in marketability than in the subjective emotive value of a texts: the genre perspective is a shared element within the wider literary culture. In fact, it links writers with readers as much as it links writers with publishers. Use of language, ideas of what makes up the past and its interpretation: these are just some of the tools writers bring to bear in creating novels using the Middle Ages.'

Source: Article overview.