Abstract :
A & C Black’s Flashbacks series invites its readers to ‘‘Read a
Flashback...take a journey backwards in time’’. There are several ways in which
children’s fiction has encouraged its readers to engage with and care about history:
through the presence of ghosts, through frame stories, time travel, or simply setting the
narrative in the past. However, modern critical theory has questioned the validity of
traditional modes of the genre. This paper defends historical fiction for children by
arguing that, whatever narrative strategy is used, such writing stands or falls through
its evocation of a historical sensibility—or what Raymond Williams calls a ‘structure of
feeling’. This is achieved through elements of style, both in the representation of
dialogue and thought. Pastiche, sometimes thought of as an unsatisfactory feature of
contemporary culture, can often perform a similar evocative function. The paper is
based on close readings of Alan Garner’s The Stone Book from 1976, and 21st century
fiction by Kevin Crossley-Holland, Kate Pennington and Paul Bajoria. If these books
do not overtly use the techniques of ‘‘historiographic metafiction’’, it may be because
awareness of historiography is implicit in the very texture of their writing
