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I take it you don't mean historical romance, but even so it might be worth checking out Georgette Heyer's Regency romances (cue groans from rest of board, sorry chaps) - they're far far better than other examples of the genre, and the period detail is very well done. Try Regency Buck - features the Prince Regent, Beau Brummell, & various other historical characters.
Apart from that, there is a lot of historical fiction around at the moment (I'm guessing that you're in the US, but you'll probably be able to find a lot of this stuff over there). Rose Tremain has written a couple of excellent historical novels, Restoration (set in, uh, the Restoration) and Music and Silence (C17 Danish court). Pat Barker's WW1 trilogy is also very good indeed - Regeneration is the first and best, the others are The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road - lots of interesting material on shell-shock, Sassoon & Owen (it all checks out with the letters and diaries too, I looked), officers and gentlemen, psychology, etc. Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger is excellent - slavery in the eighteenth century and then some. Andrew Miller has written a couple of very good novels set in the C18 of which Ingenious Pain is the better. Then there are books like Nicholas Griffin's The Requiem Shark, which is much more of a romp than the others I've listed; it's about pirates and has the usual fascinating vocabulary, etc. He's written another, The House of Sight and Shadow, which is apparently even better (Cavatina has read it, I know). C18 is my period, so I tend to read novels set in it...
Then again there are novels which are not specifically historical, but which shift between the past and the present - AS Byatt's Possession does this, and links in with your English as well. Alan Wall has written a couple of books in this vein, The Lightning Cage (C18) and The School of Night (Elizabethan skulduggery and magick, I think). A play, but Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is another example.
Some others off the top of my head: Lawrence Norfolk, Lempriere's Dictionary and The Pope's Rhinoceros; David Dabydeen, The Harlot's Progress; Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford; John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman...
What most of these have in common (apart from the Heyer stuff, but that's genre fiction) is that they are not merely historical novels but also literary novels, and as such are more open about questioning what the past does in fiction... (clumsy way of putting it - will try and rethink).
Might also be worth having a look at older historical fiction - Thackeray's Henry Esmond (Glorious Revolution), Dickens' barnaby Rudge (Gordon Riots, IIRC), Scott, & so on... |
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