Abstract Can the novel teach readers how to live in history? Put slightly differently: What do historical novels as influentially theorized by Georg Lukács reveal about the relation between history and futurity today? The answers to those questions depend on whether Lukács's account of the novel is reduced to a plot-heavy master narrative of progress—which is the prevailing tendency. Following the work of Lauren Berlant, this article advances an alternative version of Lukács's historical poetics that is focused on the historicity of distributed affective atmospheres. It makes a case for the continuing critical force of Lukács's account of the historical novel by shifting the focus away from the heroic categories of protagonist and event (the basis of recent critiques of the disabling of the dialectic through the decay of the nation-state as matrix for progressive history) and toward atmospherically dispersed affect. Rather than insisting on a binary separation of narrative typification and atmospheric causality, however, the article reads Lukács's The Historical Novel and his contemporaneous essays together with the historical novels of Sylvia Townsend Warner—particularly Summer Will Show and The Corner That Held Them—in order to develop a more dialectical account of their interrelation. A better view of history on offer in Lukács's theory and Warner's practice replaces the singular promise of history with many smaller promissory structures. This mode of attachment to history searches the past for the sense of alternative possibilities it might possess, orienting readers toward livable futures without the false reassurances of progress.
Aleksandr Prigozhin (Fri,) studied this question.