For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: Five Tuesday later morning into afternoons,, 11:50 to 1:15 pm,
June 13th to to July 18th
Tallwood, 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va
Dr Ellen Moody
Description of Course
Our topic will be the nature of recent post-modern historical fiction and how it differs from traditional historical romance. We’ll read as examples the older The King’s General by Daphne DuMaurier (1946) against the innovative The Volcano Lover (1992) by Susan Sontag. We’ll explore how such books use documents and relics from an era, history, biography, life-writing, and fantasy, to recreate an irretrievable, unknowable past. We’ll ask why historical fiction has become a central prestigious and popular genre in books and films in the last 40 years.
Required Texts (in the order we’ll read them):
DuMaurier, Daphne. The King’s General. 1946; rpt. Naperville, Ill: Sourcebooks, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-4022-1708-1
Sontag, Susan. The Volcano Lover: A Romance. NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992. ISBN0-374-28516-0 (Any recent reprint will do.)
John Everett Millais: mid-19th century illustration of a historical novel set in later 17th century, The Hampdens
June 13th: Historical fiction and romance; Daphne DuMaurier; The King’s General
June 20th: The King’s General
June 27th: Finish The King’s General; post-modern novels; Susan Sontag; begin The Volcano Lover
July 11th: The Volcano Lover
July 18th: The Volcano Lover. Last thoughts on the comparison.
Suggested supplementary reading & film:
Daphne. Dir. Clare Bevan. Script. Margaret Foster, Amy Jenkins. Featuring: Geraldine Somerville, Jane McTeer, Elizabeth McGovern. BBC, 2008.
DuMaurier, Daphne, any other of her historical novels (e.g., Jamaica Inn); her books on Cornwall (Vanishing Cornwall); her life-writing (Myself when Young)
Foster, Margaret. Daphne DuMaurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller. NY: Doubleday, 1993.
Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik. Daphne Du Maurier; Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination. London: MacMillan, 1998.
Jenkins, Jane and Kim Sloan, edd. Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and His Collection. London: British Museum Press, 1996.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. NY: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1993.
Pendennis Castle, Cornwall, before Falmouth harbor, today
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Hello Ellen,
what an interesting schedule! I would love to come over from Cologne and attend your class! I recently bought Sontag´s “The Volcano Lover” as you spoke so highly of it. Hope you´ll have lots of people signing up.
By the way, who painted the very dramatic scene of the erupting Vesuv? I googled “The Hampdens” as I´ve never heard of it. Its author Harriet Martineau called it “An Historiette”, a term I haven´t come across which seems to suggest a small history, set in a domestic environment, rather than History with a capital H? Could you (briefly) reveal what this novel is about?
Best wishes,
Andrea
P.S. Please keep on writing your blog….
Dear Andrea, It’s wonderful to hear from you again. I have not been blogging anywhere near as much as I once did. I’ve been very sad this summer; another one with little joy for me; each year the widowhood gets harder as my life is set by my previous life which left me outside most worlds. I will try to take a trip next summer — to the Lake District and Borders — no singles were left by the time I tried (today). I also have spent a lot of money this year renovating and plan other trips with my daughter. I did try for one today locally (Virginia) but I am too late; the Road Scholars are filled up. So another year teaching a bit, taking courses a bit, at the gym; I did go to the beach early on with both daughters, but that very short time. I need to go to a beautiful place.
The artist is Pierre-Jacques Volaire (1729-ca 1790-1800), Neapolitan I gather. On the novel I made the following notes: I enjoyed more than I have others in a long time. I sat down and read straight through, for quite a number of hours, day after day. I love historical fiction when well done but this went beyond or was different from the usual: Sontag took a wholly unexpected angle: instead of telling say Emma Lady Hamilton’s story or Nelson’s as a dual romance, her center was Sir William Hamilton, the collector-husband of Emma, and we saw the later 18th century from a highly corrupt marginalized cityscape: Naples where he was ambassador. The book is a meditation on why people collect, on art, on obsessions, and the fun was how the narrator was sometimes your conventional implied presence hovering between 1992 or so and the later 18th century, but then she would become more distinct, as herself, almost the scholar-essayist, and move in time to just after WW2 – because part of her story was the disastrous rebellion by a small enlightened and artisan group in Naples, savagely murdered. Eventually the perspective turned and you realized it was also about the collector’s (her way of referring to Sir Wm) wife (whom I felt so for) before Emma, Emma herself, Emma’s mother (who Emma never left behind), and a remarkable journalist-poet, Eleanor de Fonseco-Pimentel (hung). Deeply feminist, parallels among women, exploding any notions of human beings as responsive to morality, reasonableness, the very foundations of the enlightenment. The gargantuan corruption, the asinine king, all seemed so relevant to that week in December. It was worth reading almost for that last sentence by Eleanor as she waits to be taken away to be senselessly (from her point of view) humiliated and killed: “Damn them all.”
For those who love paintings, the first part of the text (remember Sr Wm is the collector) are historically real, and when the intertextuality of the talk is over, you have learned much more about them. Part of the fascination is how she brings in through allusion biographies as well as other historical fiction as part of history. It’s anti-genre, also anti-foundational, to take the term from another book I recommend which I’ve not finished as yet as I’m using it to explore its terrain, and it was from its citations I took down Volcano Lover from my shelf where it had been since 1993: Martha Bowden’s Descendants of Waverley.
[…] relieved to be able to report that at least among a group of 50+ year olds (some 25 or more) Daphne DuMaurier’s fiction is not obsolete. Someone could say in reply, well, of course not, the production of film […]
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