A paper given at the Australian Association of Writing Programmes conference, Deakin University, November 2012.

It argues that the expectation of voice in historical fiction is not that it will be genuinely ‘authentic’ but instead that it will be familiar to us from the tradition of the genre; and that what we mean by authenticity is a construct originally based on the language of the great nineteenth century novelists such as Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Download the paper here: Voicing the past AAWP 2012 Final (PDF)