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    A Study Guide for Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian"
    A Study Guide for Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian"
    A Study Guide for Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian"
    Ebook55 pages49 minutes

    A Study Guide for Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Newsmakers for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Newsmakers for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781535837316
    A Study Guide for Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian"

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      A Study Guide for Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian" - Gale

      1

      The Historian

      Elizabeth Kostova

      2005

      Introduction

      The Historian (2005) is Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel. Inspired by a Dracula story her father told her as a child, the author began writing the 642-page historical thriller while working on her master of fine arts at the University of Michigan. It took ten years to complete the novel, but her hard work paid off. Just forty-eight hours after Kostova's agent sent The Historian to publishers, Kostova was offered an advance of $2 million for the book, followed by $2 million from Sony Pictures for the film rights. The book became an instant bestseller and has been compared to Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code for its content as well as the literary fanfare both books inspired.

      The novel features an unnamed sixteen-year-old narrator, her mother, her father, her father's mentor, and each one's globetrotting search for Dracula's tomb. Interwoven storylines spanning centuries and continents are held together by the story's central focus on the life of Vlad Ţepeş Dracula, former brutal ruler of Wallachia and possible still-living vampire. History, travel, libraries, books, and scholarship serve as general themes in the book, exploring past versus present and the way that history does or does not inform the future to round things out. The story is richly detailed, romantic, suspenseful, and dense. Kostova brings each exotic location and historical footnote to life with precise and evocative language, making clear the extensive research that undergirds the book's artistry.

      Author Biography

      Elizabeth Kostova was born Elizabeth Johnson in New London, Connecticut, on August 4, 1964. According to Julie Wheelwright in the Independent (U.K.), Kostova's parents, Eleanor and David Johnson, were academics who taught at universities in New York, Indiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina. When she was seven, the author's father, an urban planning professor, was transferred to the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. The Eastern European setting, as well as trips to Vienna and Venice, made quite an impression on her. It was the formative experience of my childhood, Kostova told Wheelwright. She told Anne Sanow of Publisher's Weekly, We traveled around and saw beautiful places, and at one point [my father] he began to tell me a wonderfully creepy Dracula story.

      Her childhood travels to Eastern Europe informed Kostova's decision to study Slavonic music after graduating from Yale University in 1988. She went to Bulgaria in 1989 on a postgraduate fellowship to study the country's village music and soon met Gyorgi Kostov, her future husband. The two wed in 1990 and settled in Philadelphia. On a hiking trip through the Appalachians with her new husband, Kostova remembered her father's Dracula story. She told Sanow, I had a vision of a father telling his daughter these tales, and I thought: what if the daughter realizes that Dracula is somehow listening? I think every novel has its moment of genesis, and that was it for me. Inspired, Kostova began making notes on the spot.

      It took Kostova ten years to turn those notes into The Historian, her debut novel. According to the Guardian (U.K.), she wrote the novel while teaching fiction writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where she was earning her masters in fine arts. I wrote it in a very private and obsessive way, she told journalist Gary Younge. Her time and hard work paid off quickly, earning huge sums for the advance and the film rights. Kostova

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