The modern historical novel emerged in more or less the same period as Romantic Nationalism and is intimately bound up with it. It was the literary vehicle par excellence for the articulation of the relationship to an imagined past that was such a key feature of the “cultivation of culture” across Europe.  Arguably more than any other cultural form, the historical novel worked as a mass medium which helped to convert ideas of national history into stories with which individuals could empathize. As such, it created an important link between the public sphere and the intimate sphere of reading.  It did so by narrativizing history in terms of conflict, periods of drama, and an ongoing tension between modernization and tradition, and by presenting it in a vivid way to readers eager for new sensations. Together with aesthetic and emotive appeal, and an ability to offer new vistas on unknown periods, it offered a virtual experience of lives caught up with decisive turning points in national history.

As a popular medium, the historical novel also played an extremely important role as a relay station in the national and transnational circulation of ideas about the past. At the point of production, novelists recycled material from popular culture, and from the sphere of antiquarianism and history-writing (indeed many novelists were active in multiple fields), and they used this material to make new stories with an imaginative appeal for contemporary audiences.  Once in circulation, historical novels in turn went on to inspire further historical research and indeed to inspire a new, more experiential mode of Romantic history-writing.  Even more importantly from the point of view of the broad dissemination of ideas of nationhood, historical novels were recycled in multiple adaptations: in the visual arts, the theatre, and even material culture. Spreading like wildfire across post-1815 Europe, the genre played an important role in the transnational spread of a historicist understanding of identity. In many cases, novels also circulated in other countries in the form of translations or adaptations to opera, which meant that they also played a key role in the transnational exchange of national stories.

The emergence of the historical novel as an identifiable literary form is usually associated with the work of Walter Scott (1771–1832) and seen as an imaginative response to the historical crises of the Revolutionary period and the Napoleonic Wars, which had given ordinary people on an unprecedented scale the sense of being involved in great historical changes.  Recent scholarship has shown that Scott had important precursors in the field of English fiction (Lady Morgan, Maria Edgeworth) and elsewhere in Europe (for example, novels written by the Serbian Vidaković). There is no doubt, however, that the series of novels produced by Scott, starting with Waverley (1814) and including the international best-seller Ivanhoe (1819), marked the public breakthrough of a new type of literature that would be emulated across Europe for almost a century. There are examples of historical novels to be found in every country in Europe, though with differing degrees of importance within the national culture (in Germany, for example, historical fiction seems to have been less important than historical drama, and took the form of shorter tales rather than novels). While the highpoint of the genre in Western Europe was in the period 1820-40, when it accounted for a huge portion of all novels produced in the leading countries, Britain and France, important works of historical fiction were still being written in the final decades of the century (by Tolstoj in Russia and Bornhöhe in Estonia, for example). By 1914, however, the genre had definitively lost its place at the forefront of cultural production and, although many historical novels were still being written, these fell largely into the less publicly-valued category of “historical romance” or juvenile fiction. The 19th-century “classics” of the genre, however, have had a significant afterlife in 20th-century cinema.

While the combination of history, imagination, and storytelling defined the genre, the relative importance of these different elements differed from case to case. Where some writers showed an almost antiquarian concern for detail and strove for historical accuracy, others took huge freedoms with history and hence veered more towards myth and romance. And in the long term it was the latter version which prevailed, with a concomitant loss of cultural power in the public sphere. These variations on the basic model need to be understood against the background of the emergence of professional, archival-based history-writing in the course of the century. The earliest practitioners of the historical novel operated at a time when literature and historical writing had not yet parted ways, which meant that writers could combine imagination and history more or less with impunity, and in many cases pass from one mode of engaging with the past to the other (Scott wrote non-fictional antiquarian works as well as novels, as did the Portuguese historian/novelist Alexandre Herculano, or, in Russia, Puškin). Crucial to the extraordinary success of the historical novel in the first half of the century in Western Europe and later in other regions was the fact that novelists often treated subjects which had not yet been treated in works of history because they were too recent (as in the case of the Napoleonic Wars; see the novels of Balzac), because they had hitherto been considered rather uninteresting (like the Middle Ages), or because they were undocumented (a key issue for subaltern nations without archival holdings or without access to them).

The success of the historical novel lay in its novelty and its appeal to a modern readership, whose appetite for history it helped awaken against the background of rapid change. There was no clean break with the past, however, and many works of historical fiction written in the 19th century retain complex ties with the traditional genre of epic (Conscience’s The Lion of Flanders (1838) is a case in point, as are the Polish historical novels of Sienkiewicz) as well as with more recent variants in narrative poetry. Even if the idea of super-human heroes fitted uneasily into the world view of the urban middle classes, the epic and the historical novel continued for a while to share a common concern with offering foundational stories for contemporary society.  Historical fiction also shared some points of similarity with the historical drama, even as novels offered a larger canvas and a more extended experience of time.

What distinguished the historical novel from its various alternatives was that it offered an imaginative reworking of historical material in a strongly narrativized form, in which historical developments were linked to characters with whose actions and experiences the reader could identify. A comparison between many novels written in different languages over a longer period shows that writers borrowed from each other. Thematic and formal features recurred and mutated as the genre spread across Europe and was appropriated in quite different cultural and political contexts. A key recurring element were plots centred on a non-heroic figure who finds himself (occasionally, herself) caught up in a historical crisis and who functions thus as an observer-participant through which the meaning of the great events of the day are channelled. These “naive” protagonists were often also marked as politically non-partisan, a position which allowed them to move between conflicting parties and so offer the reader a broader perspective on the crisis while remaining rooted in the experiences of a recognizable individual.

This basic template in which history is written “from below” rather than from the perspective of commanders was first developed in Scott’s Waverley (1814) and repeated with variations in his subsequent novels. It then travelled across Europe to be found again, for example, in Puškin’s The captain’s daughter (1836), Stendhal’s La chartreuse de Parme (1839), Tolstoj’s War and peace (1869). In many cases, the actions of the non-heroic protagonist were also intimately linked to a romantic intrigue which, in criss-crossing the macro-story of society at large, served as a principle of coherence in what otherwise could have been an unmanageably broad historical canvas with multiple locations and multiple characters. This literary device also created the imaginative entanglement of private and public life that was both characteristic of the novel and central to the growth of nationalism; Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1827) with its story of star-crossed lovers against the background of Spanish rule in 17th-century Italy offers a case in point. Through its very plot design, then, the historical novel literally brought romance into Romantic nationalism, along with the related emotion of longing for a better future. Paradoxically, in view of its primary orientation towards the past, historical fiction could also be a genre par excellence for depicting a world in which change and social mobility were possible (e.g. in the work of the Slovenian Fran Levstik).

The moments of crisis at the centre of so many historical novels often have to do with conflicts that have been construed in national or ethnic terms. In some cases the struggle at the heart of the story is predominantly one between social classes or political movements (as in Hugo’s Les misérables, 1862). But more often social and political divisions are presented as derivative of ethnic ones (Manzoni’s I promessi sposi and Koder’s Kmetski triumvirat, 1884, on the peasant uprisings in Slovenia against the Austrians). It was again Scott who popularized this ethnic narrativization of history. His novels are typically designed around a conflict arising between groups defined in terms of irreconcilable differences in language and cultural identity, be these Normans and Saxons (Ivanhoe), Highlanders and Lowlanders (Rob Roy, 1817), Scottish and English (Waverley). But where Scott’s work tended towards reconciling differences, those who emulated him elsewhere adopted a more outright partisan stance. Many writers from subaltern nations took over the basic template but adapted it to construct a foundational narrative which hinged on the decisive victory of one group over another and the liberation of one group from oppression by another (as in Conscience’s The Lion of Flanders, Bornhöhe’s Tasuja, Sienkiewicz’s The Teutonic Knights). A negative version of this template served to depict the traumatic loss of sovereignty as a result of conquest and to mobilize patriotic emotions around this loss (as in Bofarull’s Catalan L’orfeneta de Menargues o Cataluna agonitzant, 1862; or the Croatian Urota srinsko-frankopanska, 1894). No matter what variant was used, historical fiction was always a way of using the past in order to cast light on present-day political and cultural configurations. In some cases, novelists undertook ambitious multi-novel projects aiming to give large-scale or long-term canvases of societal developments (Balzac’s Comédie humaine) or historical growth-patterns (the Spanish and Polish cycles of Pérez Galdos and Kraszewski, or Felix Dahn’s treatment of the history of the Germanic tribes in the Dark Middle Ages). Reflecting this entanglement of past and present concerns, the oeuvre of some writers (Balzac; Hugo; Tolstoj) shows a clear transition from an initial interest in recent history (exemplified in the historical novel) to a later interest in contemporary social issues (the realist novel).

More than any other period, the Middle Ages provided a projection screen. While there were many notable novels situated in the period since the Renaissance (Manzoni; van Lennep)  and, more recently, in the Revolutionary period (Fatur; Inisan; Balzac), the Middle Ages seem to have been far and away the most popular. Beginning with Ivanhoe, the examples are legion. A number of explanations can be offered for this fascination with the Middle Ages, which also resonated in so many other cultural fields in the 19th century, including architecture and the visual arts (Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831, for example, coincided with the restoration of the cathedral). To begin with, the Middle Ages offered a relatively unknown historical terrain (certainly in the first half of the 18th century), which meant that writers could give freer rein to their imagination than in the case of events which were still in living memory and hence often still subject to fierce controversy. Having room to imagine a history was especially important in the case of subaltern nations whose recorded history was scant. Secondly, the Middle Ages had left enough material traces in the landscape to make it feel familiar and “domestic” at the same time as it was sufficiently distant in time to make it exotic and fascinating. Thirdly, the many rediscovered medieval texts (romances, epics, chronicles) which were re-entering the public sphere again at this period further helped to turn the Middle Ages into an imaginative resource coloured by ideas of chivalry and romantic prowess, all the more appealing in a middle-class and increasingly urbanized world that had lost its traditional resources for enchantment. The fact that so many nations in Europe have heavily invested sites of memory from the Middle Ages (the 1343 St George’s Night Uprising in Estonia, the 1410 Battle of Grunwald in Poland, or the 1302 Battle of the Golden Spurs in Belgium) is arguably as much the outcome of this imaginative evocation of the Middle Ages on the part of Romantic writers as it is of the actual historical significance of these events in the development of the particular country in question.

Although the historical novel had lost much of its cultural prestige by the end of the century, it is difficult to overestimate the long-term impact of the hundreds of historical novels that were produced over a period of some three generations. This impact was enhanced by the adaptation of so many novels to the stage, to painting, and later to the cinema. In providing vivid descriptions of an action-packed historical world, novelists played a major role in making a nationalized history come visually and viscerally alive in an age before cinema. They played a key role in shaping the canon of memory sites that were believed to define the nations of Europe and that would later be enshrined in museums, monuments, and national feast-days.