Begin Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage and analyze how the novel explores the gap between imagined, storybook glory and the real psychological experience of battle.
Historical fiction is a novel set in a real past era, written by an author who did not necessarily live through the events themselves, blending invented characters and interior psychology with a real historical backdrop. It is different in kind from the slave narratives studied last week, which are firsthand accounts by people who actually lived what they describe. Historical fiction instead imagines its way into a past its author knows only secondhand.
Stephen Crane was born in 1871, six years after the Civil War ended, and had never experienced combat when he wrote The Red Badge of Courage in his early twenties. The novel follows Henry Fleming, a young Union private who enlists dreaming of the storybook heroism he has read about in tales of ancient and more recent wars, only to find real battle mostly boredom, confusion, and terror. In his first real engagement, panic overtakes him and he flees the battlefield entirely -- setting up the question the whole novel is really asking: what does courage actually consist of, if not simply the absence of fear?
Mastery looks like: They can explain the gap between Henry's imagined and actual experience of battle, and can explain the irony of how his visible wound is acquired.
Common stumbles: Judging Henry as simply a coward or simply forgivable without engaging the novel's more complicated portrait; missing that the "red badge" of the title is meant ironically rather than as straightforward praise.