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For a man who gained such fame and fortune as a world champion boxer in the 1940s and 1950s, there are remarkably few traces of Randolph Turpin left in the archives. Faced with such a scant record, how could I, situated in the present, bridge the temporal, spatial, and psychosocial gap to the interiority of my historical subject, situated in the past? My search for an effective process led me to a series of BBC Reith Lectures, delivered in 2017, by the late novelist Hilary Mantel. These texts reveal insights into how Mantel, as a writer of historical fiction, spanned the gap between herself, living in the twenty-first-century, and her historical subjects—the Tudors—living in the sixteenth-century. Mantel identifies her core methods as imagination and empathy. However, the notion of imagination and empathy as appropriate ways to access the past is met with vociferous objections from historians. Even a post-modern historian, like Keith Jenkins, draws the line at the idea that a writer can gain an empathic knowledge of their historical referent without thinking a-historically and anachronistically (Jenkins in Rethinking History. 4th ed. Routledge, 1995, 39–45). Mantel’s core methods of generating knowledge, therefore, amount to a paradigmatic rejection of the methodological framework of the historian. However, despite writers of historical and biographical fiction pursuing a kind of knowledge that sits outside the academic field of the historian (Mantel in The Day Is for the Living, 2017; Mantel in The Iron Maiden, 2017; Mantel in Adaptation: Can These Bones Live?, 2017), novelists are repeatedly expected to defend their practice on the methodological terms of the historian (Clendinnen in Quarterly Essay 23:1–72, 2006; Mantel in The Day Is for the Living, 2017; Mantel in The Iron Maiden, 2017; Mantel in Adaptation: Can These Bones Live?, 2017; Marr in Start the Week. UK: British Broadcasting Corporation. Radio Series Episode, 2015). It is perhaps not surprising that these conversations quickly become bogged down in a methodological impasse. To offer a depth of insight into the truth claims of fiction therefore, we need to re-frame the conversation in a way that encompasses accounts of writing that situate empathy and imagination as core methods in generating knowledge about the historical and biographical subject.

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Sensing the Dead: Exploring the Tensions Between Fiction and Historical Fidelity

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  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Michael Bentham

摘要

For a man who gained such fame and fortune as a world champion boxer in the 1940s and 1950s, there are remarkably few traces of Randolph Turpin left in the archives. Faced with such a scant record, how could I, situated in the present, bridge the temporal, spatial, and psychosocial gap to the interiority of my historical subject, situated in the past? My search for an effective process led me to a series of BBC Reith Lectures, delivered in 2017, by the late novelist Hilary Mantel. These texts reveal insights into how Mantel, as a writer of historical fiction, spanned the gap between herself, living in the twenty-first-century, and her historical subjects—the Tudors—living in the sixteenth-century. Mantel identifies her core methods as imagination and empathy. However, the notion of imagination and empathy as appropriate ways to access the past is met with vociferous objections from historians. Even a post-modern historian, like Keith Jenkins, draws the line at the idea that a writer can gain an empathic knowledge of their historical referent without thinking a-historically and anachronistically (Jenkins in Rethinking History. 4th ed. Routledge, 1995, 39–45). Mantel’s core methods of generating knowledge, therefore, amount to a paradigmatic rejection of the methodological framework of the historian. However, despite writers of historical and biographical fiction pursuing a kind of knowledge that sits outside the academic field of the historian (Mantel in The Day Is for the Living, 2017; Mantel in The Iron Maiden, 2017; Mantel in Adaptation: Can These Bones Live?, 2017), novelists are repeatedly expected to defend their practice on the methodological terms of the historian (Clendinnen in Quarterly Essay 23:1–72, 2006; Mantel in The Day Is for the Living, 2017; Mantel in The Iron Maiden, 2017; Mantel in Adaptation: Can These Bones Live?, 2017; Marr in Start the Week. UK: British Broadcasting Corporation. Radio Series Episode, 2015). It is perhaps not surprising that these conversations quickly become bogged down in a methodological impasse. To offer a depth of insight into the truth claims of fiction therefore, we need to re-frame the conversation in a way that encompasses accounts of writing that situate empathy and imagination as core methods in generating knowledge about the historical and biographical subject.