Historical Fiction and Advocacy

A guest post by Wendy J. Dunn from Swinburne University

SPEAKING THE SILENCES: WRITING, ADVOCACY AND ENABLING VOICE –An extract from Wendy’s paper for the refereed proceedings of the 16th annual AAWP conference, Ethical Imaginations: Writing World.

The full paper can be found here:

Biographical note:

Dear Heart, How Like You This?

Wendy J. Dunn is obsessed with Tudor History. Her first published novel, the award-winning Dear Heart, How Like You This? is described as ‘one of the best novels ever written about Anne Boleyn’s life’. After completing her Masters in Writing at Swinburne University in 2009, Wendy took up a position as a sessional tutor in the same course and became a PhD Candidate.  Her own writing journey continues.

Historical Fiction and Advocacy

Historical fiction is a multifaceted and demanding genre with complex ethical considerations for the writer to surmount. As Jonathan Nield writes in his 1902 Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales,

The spirit of a period is like the selfhood of a human being – something that cannot be handed on; try as we may, it is impossible for us to breathe the atmosphere of a bygone time, since all those thousand-and-one details which went to the building up of both individual and general experience, can never be reproduced’ (Nield 1902: 41).

Continue reading here.

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