Lincoln in the Bardo: “Uh, NOT a Historical Novel”

Abstract

While George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) has many of the characteristics of the traditional historical novel—lapse of time, incorporation of historical characters, focus on important world-historical events and conditions—it intriguingly challenges the boundaries of the genre by an unsettling approach to verisimilitude. In addition, its fragmentation and an unusual approach to narrative help to qualify it as a neo-historical novel. The author’s thoughts on historical fiction help to clarify its positioning.