IN DIALOGUE WITH THE EARLY MODERN PAST

Contemporary British historical fiction has frequently explored questions of gender and sexuality. This focus is most prevalent in new British historical fiction, an emergent subgenre which can be distinguished from historiographic metafiction. Its distinctive features include confidence that some knowledge of past realities can be attained despite their inevitable discursive mediation. It is therefore important to examine how new British historical fiction has employed particular historical settings to establish a dialogue between the past and gender and sexuality debates in the present. This essay explores the use of seventeenth-century settings in two novels by Rose Tremain to illuminate the special attraction of early modernity to writers interested in gender and sexuality. In addition, it examines how Tremain's two texts, like many other works of new British historical fiction, represent a particular past to outline new possibilities for gender and sexuality in the future, thus augmenting the transfo...