Toni Morrison's "Beloved" as a Historical Novel

This paper is based on the hypothesis that the novel “Beloved” by an African American writer Toni Morrison can be read as a historical novel and considered as a distant “descendant” of the historical novel by Walter Scott, the founder of the genre, from the point of view of the theory of evolutionary variability of the literary tradition. The theoretical part of the study is devoted to the history of the emergence and development of the historical novel genre, beginning with Scott's fiction and ending with the Morrison's novel. It also provides a brief review of critical comments in the scientific literature on the historical perspectives of Toni Morrison's Beloved. The main research part is an analysis of historical basis of the novel, highlighting the problem of the correlation of “truth” and “fiction” in it, as well as a comparative analysis of Beloved and Scott's Ivanhoe, establishing the similarities and differences between the text of the founder of the genre and the work of the modern era. The results achieved show that although Beloved has more differences than similarities with the Scott's “canon”, the research hypothesis is proved: reading Morrison’s novel in the light of the genre model of the historical novel helps to better understand both the work itself and the phenomenon of the historical novel in whole.