Then, Now, Later, Always

Considered here are two recent monographs and an essay collection that constitute evidence of a contemporary boom in both historical fiction and critical consideration thereof. In response to Alexander Manshel's Writing Backwards, Alexandra Lawrie's Writing the Past in Twenty-First Century American Fiction, and Historical Fiction Now, edited by Mark Eaton and Bruce Holsinger, this essay mediates between competing definitions of the historical and the contemporary proffered by the three works examined, before taking up Manshel's argument that the ascendancy of historical fiction and the belated canonization of African American authors are not merely coincident. In so doing, this essay posits that a publishing ecosystem increasingly set on framing fictionalized histories of racial trauma as salutary learning experiences may in fact offer (white) readers the opposite-a comforting dislocation of unresolved traumas and complicities into the safety of the past.