Historical Research, Creative Writing, and the Past: Methods of Knowing

Although historical research undertaken in different disciplines often requires speculation and imagination, it remains relatively rare for scholars to foreground these processes explicitly as a knowing method. Historical Research, Creative Writing, and the Past brings together researchers in a wide array of disciplines, including literary studies and history, ethnography, design, film, and sound studies, who employ imagination, creativity, or fiction in their own historical scholarship or who analyze the use of imagination, creativity, or fiction to make historical claims by others. This volume is organized into four topical sections related to representations of the past―textual and conceptual approaches; material and emotional approaches; speculative and experiential approaches; and embodied methodologies―and covers a variety of temporal periods and geographical contexts. Reflecting on the methodological, theoretical, and ethical underpinnings of writing history creatively or speculatively, the essays situate themselves within current debates over epistemology and interdisciplinarity. They yield new insights into historical research methods, including archival investigations and source criticisms, while offering readers tangible examples of how to do history differently.

Kevin A. Morrison is Provincial Chair Professor, University Distinguished Professor, and Professor of British Literature in the School of Foreign Languages at Henan University. He is the author of four monographs, including the MLA-award winning Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place, and, most recently, The Provincial Fiction of Mitford, Gaskell, and Eliot.

Pälvi Rantala is a Finnish researcher and nonfiction writer. She holds a docentship in cultural history at the University of Turku and works in the intersecting fields of history, sociology and cultural studies. Her research projects have combined arts, culture and social science as well as historical knowledge, and she currently works on the cultural history of sleeplessness.