Quote:
Originally Posted by BookCat
Shouldn't we read historical novels which were written by contemporaries of the period? Dickens, Austen, Hardy, George Eliot, all wrote novels based in their own times and some, like the Brontes wrote them based a little before: Wuthering Heights starts in 1750, a good 50+ years before Emily was born.
Are this bad for us too? Then my mind must be totally polluted by this 'trash'.
As to historical fiction written now about the past, would you class those which are about the lives of people who actually lived, such as Jean Plaidy's novels regarding the lives of various royal dynasties, with novels about totally fictional characters based during a time long gone?
There are lots of nuances to the historical fiction genre, you need to be more specific.
What about science fiction? Ban that on the grounds that the future may not be how those books depict? Actually some of the H G Wells books, and others, have been frighteningly accurate, though we still don't have a time machine and I haven't seen any morlocks lately.
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But Dickens and Bronte wrote contemporary novels. Just "their" contemporary.