The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club

Forthcoming Programme

In her 2017 Reith lectures, Hilary Mantel described the job of the historical novelist as putting the reader in the moment. But which is the moment and whose is the moment? If fiction offers a challenge to history; history is a challenge to the novel. The challenge was keen in 1814, when, after decades of war, the redrawing of national boundaries, and displacement of peoples, history, in the words of Georg Lukács, became ‘a mass experience’ (The Historical Novel, 1937; in English 1962). Literature is good at distilling the many into the one, making the public personal and private and therefore universal. But how might it deal with mass experience, making the many count and still be many, irreducible to one?