Emotional histories and historical emotions: looking at the past in historical novels

For anyone interested in the past and its representation, historical novels are difficult to ignore. Unlike a multitude of other alternative representations of the past that have been brought into historical view, however, historical novels have been largely excluded from scholarly historical analysis. Although historians might find historical novels fascinating, might read them voraciously, might teach courses on or around them, and might even write them while on sabbaticals, this engagement is not reflected in the pages of their work. Taking Kate Grenville's controversial Australian novel The secret river (2005) as a case study, this article considers the emotional ways in which historical novels make sense of their pasts, offering a methodological way forward in the historical analysis of the genre.