In response to Fredric Jameson’s argument, this conference argues that the peculiarity of the historical novel has been to elude any stable stratification of high and low. Its evolution exhibits rather an oscillating continuum of registers, and it’s the extent of this continuum that arguably sets it apart from other narrative forms. The text also investigates the reasons why the historical novel, nowadays, is widespread among the superior levels of fiction, even more than during its classical period, the first decades of the XIXth century.
historical novel; Lukacs; Fredric Jameson; modern literature