Dec 24, 2009

Cold Mountain | Literary Precedents

Cold Mountain is a historical novel, an adventure narrative, a naturalist essay, a love story, and a tragedy.

Since the backdrop of Cold Mountain's action is so obviously historical, one might expect its most significant literary precedents to be those of the historical novel, a genre launched by Sir Walter Scott in 1814 with his book Waverly. Like most historical novels from the lowly costume romance to Tolstoy's unsurpassed War and Peace (1865-1869), Cold Mountain mixes fictional and historical figures, with the latter playing negligible...