Understanding the past is always an act of imagination. In engaging with the past, we seek to recreate in our minds the interior and exterior contexts of past actions, and to convey this understanding to diverse audiences. The volume explores the role of imagination in researching and conveying these pasts, combining the elements of playfulness, experimentation, and rigour that are essential to bold thinking, and considers different ways to negotiate the relationship between speculation, creativity, and evidence. It asks urgent questions: What are the barriers to imagination in thinking, researching, and writing about the past? What is the relationship between imagination and 'the archive'? When might imagination pose a potential obstacle to historical understanding? How and why do we create imaginative pasts? The volume speaks to those interested in histories of archives, empathy, emotion, and the senses, and all who want to understand and engage with the past more creatively.
Price: £95.00
Pages: 360
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date:
23 March 2027
ISBN: 9781526187154
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
SOCIAL SCIENCE / Methodology, Social and cultural history, HISTORY / Historiography, HISTORY / Social History, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Writing / Academic & Scholarly, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Writing / Fiction Writing, History of scholarship (principally of social sciences and humanities), History: theory and methods, Historical fiction, Creative writing and creative writing guides
At an alarming moment in the US when conservative scholars and politicians are trying to limit what we are allowed to study in the historical record, the remarkable editors and contributors of Imaginative Pasts in the UK show us what can happen, when historians refuse the calcified boundaries of a discipline, and embrace the understanding that all recoveries of the past involve transactions between the past and the present. Some of these transactions are highly affective, and several display crucial intellectual imagination and verve, as Imaginative Pasts guides us with key examples of how honest and innovative historical recoveries can be undertaken ethically, responsibly, and sensitively, with important results. In the hands of the book's editors and contributors, the discipline of history is renewed—becoming less a silo of disciplinary constraints, and more a way into an academic future of genuinely transdisciplinary work. Bravo to these bold minds, and their transformative historical scholarship! Geraldine Heng is Perceval Professor of English & Comparative Literature at the University of Texas, Austin
Tracey Loughran is Professor History at the University of Essex
Mark Williams is Reader in Early Modern History at Cardiff University
Prelude: Found poem
Introduction: Imaginative pasts – Tracey Loughran and Mark Williams
Part I: Surfacing
Surfacing – Tracey Loughran and Mark Williams
1The precarious history of Ravenser Odd – Emily Robinson
2Time/travel – Mark Williams
3Imagined places, or a summer morning on Beothuk Lake – Julia Laite
Part II: Impressions
Impressions – Tracey Loughran and Mark Williams
4Beyond Wakanda – Afrodesia McCannon
5England without end, Amen – Eleanor Chan
6Dreaming of Daddy – Alice Sage
7Jenny the talking fish – Isabel Davis
Part III: Fixed points
Fixed points – Tracey Loughran and Mark Williams
8‘Maladjusted’ – Ruth Beecher
9Bad neighbours – Will Pooley
10Fracture points – Tracey Loughran
Afterwardsness – Tracey Loughran and Mark Williams
DIY imaginative history: A toolkit – Tracey Loughran and Mark Williams
