Word.ws English Dictionary

historical fiction

historical fiction noun: fiction based on real historical events, but in which the characters are not real, and the minor events may not be realistic.

Noun

historical fiction (uncountable)

  1. Fiction based on real historical events, but in which the characters are not real, and the minor events may not be realistic.
    • For some, historical fiction should be read as a type of history, for others, a type of fiction. Only gradually did a third term develop that synthesised the two: historical fiction needed to be read as historical fiction, as its own distinct genre that combined features of the novel with features...2013, Kate Mitchell, Nicola Parsons, editors, Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past, Springer, →ISBN, page 21

Questions about historical fiction

What does historical fiction mean?
Historical fiction means fiction based on real historical events, but in which the characters are not real, and the minor events may not be realistic.
What part of speech is historical fiction?
Historical fiction is a noun.

Words near historical fiction in the dictionary

  1. historical cost
  2. historical costs
  3. historical criticism
  4. historical dictionaries
  5. historical dictionary
  6. historical fiction
  7. historical interpreter
  8. historical interpreters
  9. historical linguistics
  10. historical materialism
  11. historical method

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: historical fiction (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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