Author: Gabrielle Jones
Jones, Gabrielle, 2023 Balancing Authenticity: Genderfluid Representation in Historical Fiction, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
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This thesis focuses on authenticity, a concept commonly discussed theoretically by academics of historical fiction, expanding upon the existing literature in two directions. First by showing how the concept of authenticity can be applied to the creation of queer characters. Secondly by exploring how to practically create the affect in a historical fantasy text.
The creative work, a novella titled Ing’s Saga, takes a practical approach in exploring how authors can create authenticity — both for their historical settings and for unrepresented queer sexualities and genders by focusing on the protagonist, Ing — a genderfluid Viking leader. Centring around a queer romance, the characters navigate social expectations with their true feelings. The novella balances modern conceptions of gender and sexuality with a historical setting to show how the techniques of creating authentic queer characters can help create an authentic historical world, and vis versa. Also, by choosing to focus on a historical subject relatively unknown, this novella demonstrates how fiction can be used to expand historical knowledge by exploring the possibilities of our past.
The exegesis, titled Balancing Authenticity: Genderfluid Representation in Historical Fiction, discusses common anxieties about writing historical and queer fiction, analyses how to create an authentic feeling of both a historical world and genderfluid characters, and demonstrates how hybrid genres (historical queer fiction) can use two different types of authenticity to support one another; thus proving that authenticity is a better tool than accuracy for fiction.
Keywords: Historical Fiction, Historical Accuracy, Authenticity, Genderfluid, Genderfluid Representation
Subject: Humanities thesis
Thesis type: Masters
Completed: 2023
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Lisa Bennett