Historical fiction

Historical fiction is imaginative narrative set in a past period, often combining invented characters or events with historical people, settings, and circumstances.

Historical novel: A novel whose plot and characters are situated in a past historical period. The novel is the form most closely associated with long-form historical storytelling.
Historical research: The investigation of the past using primary sources, scholarship, and other evidence. Research supplies details about lives and settings that surviving records rarely describe completely.
Walter Scott: A Scottish novelist and poet whose works helped establish the historical novel in the early nineteenth century. Scott's novels made social change and conflict between eras central to popular historical storytelling.
Historical nonfiction: Nonfiction that reconstructs or explains the past using historical evidence. Unlike fiction, it presents its account as an evidence-based claim about what happened.
Collective memory: Shared representations of the past through which a group understands its history and identity. Popular stories can influence which events and people become familiar parts of public memory.
Historical setting: The time and place in which a narrative unfolds, shaped by the conditions of a particular past society. Material details and social conditions make a fictional past feel specific.
Primary source: A source created during or close to the period or event being studied. Letters, diaries, and records can ground a story in evidence from its chosen period.
Waverley: Walter Scott's 1814 novel about a young English officer caught up in the Jacobite rising of 1745. Often treated as a foundational historical novel, it joins an invented protagonist to a documented revolt.
Alternate history: A genre that imagines a different course of history after a point of divergence from recorded events. It deliberately changes major outcomes rather than mainly inventing within the known past.
Public history: The practice of presenting and interpreting history for audiences beyond academic specialists. Historical fiction reaches broad audiences and often becomes an informal encounter with the past.

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