Office Hours: Historical Fiction

As busy parents and teachers, any opportunity we can find to combine subjects and "kill two birds with one stone" is a boone and a blessing. And it isn't a stretch to say that literature and history are a natural pairing. History is itself a narrative of the past, and literature in the same way is a product of its historical context. But what are the differences between these two studies? And what do we do when we encounter the marriage of these studies in a work of historical fiction? How do we receive from historical fiction without doing violence to either the art of literature or the art of history? You've been asking for this one, and we just happen to have a history Ph.D. candidate on staff to help us think through these issues!