‘Causing misery and suffering miserably’: Representations of the Thirty Years’ War in Literature and History

This article examines a range of fictional literature – poetry, prose, play and song produced between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries – that represents aspects of the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict fought in Europe from 1618 to 1648. Depiction of the Thirty Years’ War in literary works is compared to that found in empirical historical evidence and historians’ analyses. It is concluded that historical fictions offer a different, but equally valid, account of the conflict to academic histories, and that by using historical fictions and empirical evidence together, a more holistic picture of events is offered than academic histories alone provide.

Young Lions and Historical Fictions 1990–2000

The young generation of musicians such as Wynton and Branford Marsalis who shook up jazz in the 1980s arrives on screen in the following decade. Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues and the cable-TV movie Lush Life fictionalize successful musicians of the era. Underage players also show up, as in 1940s movies: a teenage Toronto trumpeter gets advice from good and bad mentors in one, and a young pianist grapples with Tourette’s syndrome in another. In the 1990s, we see an outbreak of historical tales with unreliable narrators: a sometimes fanciful biopic of early jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and Woody Allen’s extended tall tale Sweet and Lowdown, one of two 1990s films with a guitarist beholden to Django Reinhardt. In several particulars, Robert Altman’s Kansas City parallels his earlier film named for a musicians’ hub, Nashville, but in Kansas City, jazz doesn’t invade the main story.

Historical Fiction, Academic History, and Civic Pageantry (c. 1850–c. 1960)

Chapter 4, which covers the period from c. 1850 to c. 1960, begins with a genre of representation that came into its own in the nineteenth century: historical fiction. The chapter addresses some of the interpretive challenges that historical fictions present and offers new readings of two early stories about Wolsey, both set in his native Suffolk. The emergence of historical fiction occurred contemporaneously with far-reaching developments in academic historiography. With the publication of copious original documents from the Henrician period came new resources for the study of Wolsey. The chapter explores the work of such historians as James Anthony Froude and J. S. Brewer, alongside the Wolsey biographies of Mandell Creighton (1891), Ethelred Taunton (1902), A. F. Pollard (1929), and Hilaire Belloc (1930). It observes how Victorian historians were often zealous about policing the boundaries of their discipline. Finally, since it is from this period that we have the earliest evidence for the public commemoration of Wolsey, the chapter explores the ways in which the cardinal was remembered in early-twentieth-century civic pageants in Oxford and Ipswich, as well as on the anniversaries of his Oxford foundation, currently known as Christ Church.

“Is This Real?”

One salutary effect of encountering the often bizarre materials—Leibniz's possible worlds theory, war-games played in Prussian military academies, books about the presidency of Jefferson Davis—that Catherine Gallagher has assembled in Telling It Like It Wasn't is that one obtains a better purchase on the deep weirdness that also informs normal realist novels. That weirdness is central to the realist tradition's historical fictions especially, by virtue of the peculiar manner in which they compound together fictional invention and referentiality and call on readers to traverse the ontological chasms between the two.