Sympathy for Oswald Mosley: Politics of Reading and Historical Resemblance in the Moral Imagination of an English Literary Society

The mid-twentieth-century English novelist, Henry Williamson, wrote nature stories but also romantic and historical fiction, including a fifteen-volume saga that contains a largely favorable characterization of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. This essay considers the challenge of such a fascist character through the prism of the literary imagination of Williamson readers, and more specifically through my longstanding ethnographic work with an English literary society constituted in the author’s name. I am centrally concerned with how literary society members deal with the positive depiction of the Mosley-based character through the stages of the reading process that they identify and describe. Do the immersive values commonly attached to their solitary reading culture, for instance, assist or further problematize that engagement? What role does their subsequent, shared practice of character evaluation play? As well as considering the treatment of characters as objects of sympathy, I explore the vital sympathies that for literary society members tie characters together with historical persons. Across the essay I dialogue with anthropological literature on exemplars, historical commentaries on the fascist cult of leadership, and finally with the philosophical claims that Nussbaum makes for the moral and political consequences of fiction reading.

Archival Reenactement and the Role of Fiction

The Atlas Group created a digital mixed-media archive of contemporary Lebanese history, made up of produced and found documents. These archives look immediately ambiguous: they don’t collect historical documents; they actually contain visual artefacts created by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad. These digital mixed-media archives — partly accessible on the web but also physically exhibited and performed — are not intended to preserve the memory of the past, but they become indeed useful to actualize history by giving it back in the form of a historical fiction. What if archives should not deal with memory, but with amnesia? And what kind of historical temporality do they re-activate?

The Julian Romance

The Julian Romance is a work of historical fiction in Syriac. It offers a Christian perspective on the reigns of both Julian and Jovian, who in the text are presented as opposites. As regards Julian, the Romance is essentially a hatchet job, while conversely it glorifies Jovian. The Romance divides into three distinct narratives. The first narrative is short in its surviving form, but must originally have been longer because it concludes with the following words: “The celebration of the faith of Constantine and of his three sons who reigned after him is completed.” The second one I have called the Eusebius Narrative and describes at great length the many unsuccessful attempts of Julian to have Rome’s bishop Eusebius renounce his Christian conviction and become a venerator of the old gods. To that end, but also to be acknowledged as ruler of the entire empire by the city of Rome, Julian visits Rome. The third account, which I have entitled the Jovian Narrative, can be characterized as a narrative of war: war between Julian and the Christians, war between Rome and Persia, and in a sense Jovian’s war against Julian in order to protect Christianity and the Church. It is by far the longest of the three parts of the Romance and celebrates Jovian as the ideal Christian emperor. In this chapter the various narratives are introduced and a comprehensive summary is given of the Jovian Narrative.

Introduction

The Introduction offers a survey of the primary non-Christian and Christian sources available for a reconstruction of the short reign of Jovian. The most important source obviously is Book 25 of Res Gestae of the pagan Ammianus Marcellinus. He presents a gloomy picture of the person and reign of Jovian in order to save the image of his hero and Jovian’s predecessor, Julian (the Apostate). From Edward Gibbon onward, modern scholarship has adopted this unfavorable image that presents Jovian’s reign as a meaningless period between the emperorship of Julian (361–363) and the rule of the Valentinians (364–378). However, Jovian’s rule was vital for the sustenance of imperial leadership after Julian’s disastrous Persian military campaign and religious policies, both of which caused considerable upheaval. Jovian’s reign was a return to the norms of the pre-Julianic period and brought back stability to the Roman empire. For an emperor who ruled such a short time, the Christian Jovian had an unexpected and surprising afterlife. The second part of the book discusses Jovian’s “Nachleben” in the so-called Syriac Julian Romance, a text of historical fiction that has rarely been studied and is largely unknown to historians of the late Roman period.

Authorizing Early Modern European Women

The essays in this volume analyze strategies adopted by contemporary novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and biographers interested in bringing the stories of early modern women to modern audiences. It also pays attention to the historical women creators themselves, who, be they saints or midwives, visual artists or poets and playwrights, stand out for their roles as active practitioners of their own arts and for their accomplishments as creators. Whether they delivered infants or governed as monarchs, or produced embroideries, letters, paintings or poems, their visions, the authors argue, have endured across the centuries. As the title of the volume suggests, the essays gathered here participate in a wider conversation about the relation between biography, historical fiction, and the growing field of biofiction (that is, contemporary fictionalizations of historical figures), and explore the complicated interconnections between celebrating early modern women and perpetuating popular stereotypes about them.

The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed: The New Historical Fiction by Ina Bergmann

The nineteenth century is a crucial phase in America’s history. Key features such as geographical expansions, the industrial revolution, development in science and technology, and America’s emergence as a super power, after the American Revolution and the War of 1812, mark the century. The Civil War becomes the most important historical event of this phase that will impact the lives of Americans in the years to come. The century has literary importance also because, during this phase, forerunners of American literature, like, Edgar Allen Poe, James Cooper, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, etc., come to the scene. Thus, the century as the setting has always been a literary choice for historical novelists.

Authorizing Early Modern European Women

The essays in this volume analyze strategies adopted by contemporary novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and biographers interested in bringing the stories of early modern women to modern audiences. It also pays attention to the historical women creators themselves, who, be they saints or midwives, visual artists or poets and playwrights, stand out for their roles as active practitioners of their own arts and for their accomplishments as creators. Whether they delivered infants or governed as monarchs, or produced embroideries, letters, paintings or poems, their visions, the authors argue, have endured across the centuries. As the title of the volume suggests, the essays gathered here participate in a wider conversation about the relation between biography, historical fiction, and the growing field of biofiction (that is, contemporary fictionalizations of historical figures), and explore the complicated interconnections between celebrating early modern women and perpetuating popular stereotypes about them.