This lecture will address the challenges of reimagining the London of Geoffrey Chaucer, John of Gaunt, and King Richard II through the lens of historical fiction. As a scholar of medieval culture, Holsinger has long taught the culture of medieval England to his students, and his archival and literary research has explored numerous dimensions of the era from an academic perspective. But this is a very different task than writing novels set in the same period. Do scholarship and fiction represent antagonistic approaches to the historical past? Holsinger will take up this and other questions as he draws on his experience as a scholar and a novelist in recovering the depths and richness of medieval London.
Bruce Holsinger is an award-winning novelist and literary scholar. His debut novel, A Burnable Book (William Morrow/HarperCollins), won the John Hurt Fisher Prize, was named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and was shortlisted by the American Library Association for Best Crime Novel of 2014. His second novel, The Invention of Fire, received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal and was named an Amazon Book of the Month for April 2015. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Slate, the Washington Post, and many other national and international publications, and he has appeared several times on NPR.
As Professor of English at the University of Virginia, Bruce teaches courses on medieval and modern literature, from Beowulf to contemporary fiction. He has taught historical fiction to students from around the world in a massive open online course (or MOOC) called “Plagues, Witches, and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction,” which in fall 2013 brought together prominent authors, scholars, and over 20,000 students to consider the genre and craft of the historical novel from the eighteenth century to the present. He is the author or editor of six nonfiction books, which have garnered major awards from the Modern Language Association, the American Musicological Society, and the Medieval Academy of America (you can read about his scholarly work here). His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he is the recipient of research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Council of Learned Societies.
