Historical fiction and story: the informed imagination

Primary History article

By Nuffield Primary History Project, published 23rd July 2012

Historical stories and fiction give full rein to children's imaginations and creativity. As such, they are a standard, major element in pupils' historical authoring.Writing history stories is stimulating, enjoyable and challenging. When using their historical imaginations children as authors have to be disciplined. They must work within the strict parameters that divide historical stories and historical fiction from fairy stories and fiction per se. Historical novelists and historians have one crucial thing in common - to be as true to the record of the past as possible; to ground their composition in immersion in the historical evidence - its original, first hand sources and subsequent histories.

Philippa Gregory - Fiction and the Historical Novel

Phillipa Gregory is a prolific, subtle and convincing writer of historical fiction set in the late Middle Ages and Tudor period. In The Women of the Cousins War (2011) she delineates the relationship between the historical framework and how the novelist [story teller] brings the past to life...

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