Historical fantasy – a genre that blends historical reality with elements impossible in their historical periods, such as magic or preposterously advanced technology – affords us new ways of understanding the processes behind the constant remediation of cultural memory by accepting a narrative logic that overtly rejects the paradigm of historical verisimilitude.
In doing so, it allows for an imaginative engagement with the past that is open to radical transformation. Such profound alterations of historical events can also serve to interrogate the grand narratives often associated with them by revealing different, perhaps disturbing potentialities – what could have preferably happened and what has thankfully not.
Dragoş Manea is an assistant lecturer at the University of Bucharest, where he teaches seminars in American literature, translation, and academic writing. His main research interests include the adaptation of history, cultural memory, and the relationship between ethics, politics, and fiction.
This book brings fresh perspectives on popular culture in eighteenth-century England. Covering the less examined time span between 1700 and 1780, it sheds light on a variety of subjects that attest to the bourgeoning of early modern capitalism, which caused a radical change in the social identity and values of the elite, the middling sort and the vulgus. From urban life, popular recreations, the reformation of the Julian calendar and the emergence of the socio-cultural phenomenon of the mob to the popularity of the almanac, the relationship between oral and print culture, the perception of the “Other” in the empire and, finally, the relevance of popular culture to the literary forms of the time, this study reveals the ongoing interaction between “high” and “low” through the prism of literary and cultural history.