July 8, 2005

Novel Approach to History; The Focus on Teenage Girls

In a recent book called Savage Reprisals, the historian Peter Gay tries to debunk the use of novels as a way of understanding history. As an empirical scholar, he feels these novels are not accurate. Dickens, he says, is too emotional, and entirely ignorant of the utilitarianism he lampoons in Hard Times. As a Freudian, he feels that novels are not impartial enough; they are distorted by the prejudices and neuroses of the authors, their grudge against the society that formed them. Gay, a

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