Excessive Belief: Transport and Immersion in Nineteenth-Century Historical Fiction

Abstract Nineteenth-century historical fiction, as established, per Georg Lukács, in Walter Scott's “classical form of the historical novel,” neutralizes strong psychic energies of historical agency—enthusiasm—by containing them within a representation of impersonal historical process driven by immanent scientific laws. The enthusiast, the quixotic dupe of an overheated imagination, believes he is not only the hero of the story but its author too. Scott insulates enthusiasm, correlated with sublime transport, by foregrounding narrative devices of historical and literary mediation. The oscillation between states of imaginative immersion and alienated removal sustains (if precariously) the suspension of disbelief that is the condition of the reader's activity of critical reflection. Countering Scott's practice, later experiments in fanatical narration deploy immersive techniques which dissolve the rhetorical boundaries of mediation and model individual absorption into collective action—to phobic effect, in the case of Carlyle's The French Revolution, or utopian, in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's historical novel of anticolonial uprising Anandamath.