historical fantasy

HISTORICAL FICTION TEST

If you encounter in a book or a movie characters and situations such as the following, does it matter to you?

1. Edgar Allen Poe sees a psychiatrist.

2. Emily Brontë buys a notebook for writing.

3. Christopher Marlowe is diagnosed with Aids.

4. Galileo loses a filling in his tooth.

5. Benazir Bhutto sells trinkets on a Karachi street.

6. Mark Twain enrolls his daughter in preschool.

7. Helen Keller is gifted with a seeing-eye dog.

8. Florence Nightingale takes a blood sample for analysis.

9. Harriet Tubman is invited to dinner by a plantation owner.

10. Charles Darwin is admitted to a hospital with abdominal pain.

11. Michelangelo sips champagne.

If you’re not sure of the historical inaccuracy in each sentence, I’ll come back to that in a later blog. For now, I’m working on an idea about the genre of historical fiction and how some writers are revising it into something other than historical fiction (defined as a story with fictional characters and events in an historical setting). This recent trend creates something more like magical history or historical fantasy.

-->