Christianity & Literature

Scholarship on historical fiction recognizes this genre’s unique ability to unmask cultural myths and social ills but often leaves readers longing for constructive ways to move forward. Lynne W. Hinojosa contributes to the study of historical fiction by exploring a hopeful understanding of the past and the writing of historical fiction informed by Christian theology. Drawing on Jürgen Moltmann’s 1964 book A Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, Hinojosa argues that Christian [End Page 557] hope is inextricable from having an eschatological view of history as the site to receive grace and enact the church’s mission. Such hope requires of both individuals and the church institutionally an active willingness to open the self to expanding historical knowledge and renewing the relation with one’s neighbor. Towards this mission, Hinojosa argues, historical fiction like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series can instill in readers a fuller understanding of history and the church’s role within it and a more active practice of hope.

Contrasting with Christian hope, chapter 2 theorizes three modes of hope in historical fiction: “utopic hope,” “ironic hope,” and “idealistic hope.” Hinojosa starts with a critical dialogue between Frank Kermode and Moltmann. Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967) identifies two experiences of time: chronos, which describes successive, passing historical time burdened with complexity and contradictions, and kairos, which describes blessed, fleeting moments when “readers escape passing time and sense that everything is working together” (31). The conception of chronos and kairos, Moltmann points out, implies three derivatives of Christian hope. The first is utopian hope, which seeks to unify chronos and kairos with a totalizing vision to avoid the contradictions of history. The second is ironic hope, which embraces self-estrangement and detachment from history. Lastly, idealistic hope seeks to deny the reality of history by inhabiting private, idealistic kairos moments of mysticism and self-realization. In contrast with these modern derivatives, Moltmann argues that Christian hope sees history as already shaped by God’s eschatological promise of redemption in all its contradiction and incoherence. Such hope requires humans to live and act faithfully within time.

Combining “ironic hope” and “idealistic hope,” the four postmodern historical novels examined in chapter 3 rely on kairos moments to allow readers fleeting, pleasurable moments of belonging and understanding. Hinojosa points out that postmodern historical novel often employs elements of romance to create consolatory kairos moments in idealized romantic human fellowship or epiphanies of self-knowledge and sense of belonging to a coherent historical narrative, both of which “make the reader forgetful of the historical character of reality” (53). Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) embodies “ironic hope,” in which the protagonist retreats into self-isolation to protect himself from the complex, harsh reality of chronos time. A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990) and Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992) both offer some measure of idealistic hope in romantic, transcendent moments of communion in which the characters escape social and temporal restrictions. Finally, Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) demands readers to consider the ethical legitimacy of pursuing “narrative consolation” at the expense of historical reality. Hinojosa argues that these postmodern historical novels offer the potential for enlarging the reader’s self-knowledge and historical understanding but ultimately give no call for readers to work in time and history for personal and structural change. [End Page 558]

Focusing on utopic hope, chapter 4 examines four science fiction novels that seek to enter into the future through an abrupt abandonment of history. The chapter takes its departure from Fredric Jameson’s influential critique of postmodern fiction as inherently historically forgetful, and, as a result, science fiction is the only historical fiction capable of evoking “social dreaming.” Hinojosa examines four Marxist-inspired science fictions, with particular attention to the critique of the complicity and failure...