Professor Manshel's 'Writing Backwards' was awarded the 2026 Perkins Prize!
The Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize is awarded to 'Writing Backwards', Professor Manshel's recent book!
Established in 1994, the Perkins Prize honors Barbara Perkins and George Perkins, the founders of both The Journal of Narrative Technique and the Society itself. The prize is awarded to the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative in a given year.
The Perkins Prize on Writing Backwards:
Alexander Manshel’s Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon offers a striking example of the power that cultural history can lend to narrative studies, and vice-versa. Manshel’s truly illuminating innovation is to take an idea that has long been current in literary studies—that the values and ideologies reflected in literature are historical phenomena—and apply it specifically to the question of literary form. In doing so, it helps establish a kind of historical narratology as a viable alternative to both the specificity of close reading and the abstraction of more distant or digital methods. Rather than seeing genres as more or less timeless conventions, Manshel shows how the question of narrative form is inevitably connected to a complex and changing interplay of historical contexts: prizes, publishers, syllabi, and academic trends and debates. At the center of Manshel’s project is a fascinating story about how one particular type of narrative, historical fiction by minority writers, became “contemporary literature’s most prestigious and politically potent genre” in the past five decades. But the thrill of this study is methodological, showing us how we might go about determining when and why certain narrative forms, techniques, and genres acquire cultural salience or value amidst larger historical currents. In further opening the connection between literary form and literary history Manshel’s study offers not only innovative readings of individual texts but a brilliant account of how (and what, and why) we read now.