Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon(Literature Now)

Finalist, 2025 SHARP Book History Book Prize, Society for the Study of the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. Midcentury writers tended to set their works in their own moment, but for the last several decades critical acclaim and attention have fixated on historical fiction. This shift is particularly dramatic for writers of color. Even as the literary canon has become more diverse, cultural institutions have celebrated Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous novelists almost exclusively for their historical fiction. Writing Backwards explores what the dominance of historical fiction in the contemporary canon reveals about American literary culture. Alexander Manshel investigates the most celebrated historical genres—contemporary narratives of slavery, the World War II novel, the multigenerational family saga, immigrant fiction, and the novel of recent history—alongside the literary and academic institutions that have elevated them. He examines novels by writers including Toni Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Colson Whitehead, Julia Alvarez, Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Chabon, Julie Otsuka, Yaa Gyasi, Ben Lerner, and Tommy Orange in the context of MFA programs, literary prizes, university syllabi, book clubs, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Manshel studies how historical fiction has evolved over the last half century, documenting the formation of the newly inclusive literary canon as well as who and what it still excludes. Offering new insight into how institutions shape literature and the limits of historical memory, Writing Backwards also considers recent challenges to the historical turn in American fiction.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Contemporary Fiction in Reverse 2. The Making of the Greatest Generation 3. Colson Whitehead’s History of the United States 4. Reading the Family Tree 5. The Rise of the Recent Historical Novel Coda: Excavating the Present Notes Works Cited Index

About the Author :
Alexander Manshel is an assistant professor of English at McGill University.

Review :
Writing Backwards offers us a surprising new history of the contemporary novel that no future critic will be able to ignore. Alexander Manshel’s book reads like a detective story, but the stakes of the mystery are very high. He explains how, when the literary canon has itself receded for many into a more remote past, history has come flooding back into serious fiction, especially fiction by minoritized writers. In a series of intricate readings, Manshel demonstrates that history is not done with the novel. Writing Backwards is a penetrating survey of contemporary U.S. literature and an original, revelatory account of how literary fiction has been reshaped by ideological shifts within elite cultural institutions in and since the 1980s. Learned and insightful, beautifully written and persuasively argued, this is a timely and indispensable book. Alexander Manshel's Writing Backwards is essential reading for students and scholars of contemporary American literary studies. His insights into how institutions and market appetites establish "literary" value are provocative and profound. This book has changed how I think about the relationship between history and the critical acclaim accorded American novels. In a brilliant stroke of analysis, Alexander Manshel shows that two of the most striking recent changes in the system of literary prestige—a tendency to value historical fiction over novels of contemporary life, and a weakening of the white monopoly on critical esteem—are in fact two sides of the same symbolic coin. Writing Backwards is essential reading for anyone interested in the racial dynamics of value in contemporary American letters. Writing Backwards is at once a bold interpretation and a persuasive critique of contemporary literature’s investments in historical recovery. Drawing on close reading, institutional history, and sociological analysis, Alexander Manshel demonstrates how an earnest commitment to context has defined not only the shape of recent narrative fiction but the ethos of the critical establishment that shapes its reception. The book is a standout example of literary sociology’s capacity to write literary history anew by looking at the institutions and networks that produce symbolic prestige and guide cultural attention. [Writing Backwards] make[s] major contributions to a post-McGurl sociology of literature . . . Manshel’s argument that historical fiction has achieved a new prestige in American literary culture over the course of the last four decades is ultimately convincing. A fascinating new book . . . Manshel's research exposes the inertia and unspoken rules that shape literary institutions. One of the year’s most trenchant . . . literary studies. The trend Manshel observes is very real. Once you see how pervasive traumatic, historical fiction has become, you cannot unsee it. Writing Backwards also convinced me that the overlapping aims of universities, prize committees and cultural institutions have produced this trend. But Manshel’s book raises broader questions: What is the so-called literary canon supposed to do? What has it done in the past? And does the canon matter in an era when literary education is crowded out by technical training and online distraction? Manshel persuasively argues that the default assumption that nonwhite writers ought to write historical fiction has created imbalances in literary culture. Helping to make sense of [the] profusion [of historical fiction] is Manshel’s excellent Writing Backwards, a wide-ranging study of the recent historical novel. This volume offers food for thought for novelists, critics, and historians alike. Recommended. With his forest-and-trees account of this phenomenon, Manshel has produced an indispensable retelling of recent American literary history. And against the backdrop of today’s culture wars, Writing Backwards offers an urgent case study of the centrality of race in American historical memory. A consistently rewarding and insightful work of criticism.