Introduction: History and Contemporary Literature

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Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies
Vol. 0, 2015
Introduction: History and Contemporary Literature
Harrison Christine University of Indianapolis,
Athens Campus
Spiropoulou Angeliki University of the
Peloponnese
http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/syn.16202
Copyright © 2015 Christine Harrison, Angeliki
Spiropoulou
To cite this article:
Harrison, C., & Spiropoulou, A. (2015). Introduction: History and Contemporary Literature. Synthesis: an Anglophone
Journal of Comparative Literary Studies, 0(8), 1-13. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/syn.16202
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Synthesis 8 (Fall 2015) 1
Introduction:
History and Contemporary Literature
Christine Harrison and Angeliki Spiropoulou
The ‘turn to history’ over the last few decades has become a central preoccupation
within contemporary cultural criticism, as is witnessed, for example, in the
theoretical trend of ‘New Historicism.’ While the ‘history turn’ in the humanities
has assumed an astounding variety of forms, the new prominence of history in
contemporary literature is without doubt one of its most significant and intriguing
manifestations. Indeed, historical poetry, drama and particularly fiction,
comprising texts at least partly set in past periods, have become a defining feature
of the literary scene in diverse regions of the world. Surveying developments in
contemporary British fiction, for example, James English stresses the importance
of “the putative Renaissance and refashioning of historical fiction in Britain since
the 1970s” (11), thus highlighting the many transformations that fiction's most
recent engagement with history has also brought. Indeed, the distinct historical
focus in fiction produced at least since the late 1970s is only comparable to that in
the classic, nineteenth-century historical novel.
Even though formalist modernism’s experimental engagement with history and
temporality has recently been highlighted, not least by Hayden White,
1
it is the long
realist novel that, as White paradigmatically argues, competes with historiography
itself in the way it ‘emplots’ facts and events to render a ‘truthful’ sense of
historical reality. However, contemporary literature may be said not to reproduce
‘reality’ but rather to reflect on the relation between reality, fiction and history,
often alluding to the ways in which realism and modernism have implicitly
represented and thus conceived this relation. In her influential study, A Poetics of
Postmodernism (1988), Linda Hutcheon privileges a new kind of historical fiction
which she terms “historiographic metafiction,” distinguished by formal self-
reflexiveness while, paradoxically, laying claim to historical events and personages
(5). Although Hutcheon acknowledges the modernist legacy of problematising
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Christine Harrison and Angeliki Spiropoulou, Introduction
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history in such purportedly ‘postmodern’ fiction, she also emphasises the latter’s
constitutive difference given its inscription in an ambivalent mode.
“Postmodernism,” she writes,
is both oedipally oppositional and filially faithful to modernism. The provisional,
indeterminate nature of historical knowledge is certainly not a discovery of
postmodernism. Nor is the questioning of the ontological and epistemological status
of historical “fact” or the distrust of seeming neutrality and objectivity of recounting.
But the concentration of these problematisations in postmodern art is not something
we can ignore....The postmodern, then, effects two simultaneous moves. It reinstalls
historical contexts as significant and even determining, but in so doing, it
problematises the entire notion of historical knowledge. (88,89).
Questions of historical teleology, causality, sources, and point of view are typically
thematised in contemporary literature’s revisiting of the past, but without resort to
a nostalgic mood or claims to truth. Writing of contemporary fiction’s engagement
with history in The Metafictional Muse (1982), the critic Larry McCaffery also
notes that such literature is “self-conscious” both “about its literary heritage and
about the limits of mimesis,” but he maintains that it nevertheless manages “to
reconnect its readers to the world outside the page” (264). Thus, the question of
genre in relation to mimesis is posed anew and further complicated by the
acknowledged formal hybridity of contemporary historical literature.
Generic explorations
Contemporary historical literature is not uniform in its manifestations, methods
and influences: it has been characterised by as many differences as continuities,
creating a complexity rarely communicated in relevant critical studies, which tend
to subsume diverse developments under very general headings.
2
In an attempt to
redress such neglect, the papers in this issue have been selected with a view to
highlighting the aforementioned complexity, for they illustrate both the central
continuities and the different directions in form and concern that historical drama,
poetry and particularly fiction have taken at various stages of the recent ‘historical
turn.’
It is telling that four of the six papers in the issue examine historical novels
published during the 1980s, 1990s and early twenty-first century, thus testifying to
the acknowledged dominance of the novel form since the beginnings of the history
turn in contemporary literature. However, the issue also addresses important
developments in contemporary historical drama and narrative poetry. Dorothy
Flothow, for example, explores a dynamic new form of historical drama for
children in “Kings, Celebrities and Working Mums: Kjartan Poskitt’s Plays for
Young Actors as History and Entertainment,” while in “The Emperor’s Babe: Re-
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Christine Harrison and Angeliki Spiropoulou, Introduction
Synthesis 8 (Fall 2015) 3
narrating Roman Britannia, De-essentialising European History,” Esther Gendusa
offers a reading of a novel-in-verse which deconstructs traditional genre
boundaries between poetry and fiction. The role such ‘genre-bending’ plays in
much contemporary historical literature is yet further explored in other papers in
the issue, most notably Angeliki Tsetsi’s study of W.G. Sebald’s idiosyncratic blend
of biography, travelogue and memoir in “Historiography in Photo-textuality; The
Representation of Trauma in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.”
These crossings of conventional (formal) boundaries suggest that
contemporary historical fiction confirms Bakhtin’s definition of the novel as “a
genre that is ever-questing, ever examining itself and subjecting its established
forms to revision” (39), and this also helps account for the plethora of fictional
subgenres that have emerged in the last few decades. However, little consensus
exists about the principal forms contemporary historical fiction has taken even
within the same cultural and/or geographical context.
3
Although it is not within
the scope of the issue to fully address this particular question, one of its aims is to
shed light on the diversity of subgenres that have proved central to developments
in historical fiction, as well as drama and poetry, since the 1980s. For example,
Gendusa’s contribution shows how The Emperor’s Babe embodies the fruitful
encounter of both contemporary historical fiction and poetry with particular
movements in turn-of-the-century feminism and postcolonial theory, thus bearing
witness to the pivotal role of theoretical trends in the development of new
historical literature. Postcolonial historical fiction is also the subject of both Beth
Rosenberg’s “The Postcolonial Jew in Anita Desai’s Baumgartner’s Bombay and
Caryl Phillips’ The Nature of Blood” and Nandana Dutta’s “Amitav Ghosh and the
Uses of Subaltern History,” thus highlighting the importance of this subgenre in a
wide variety of locations and in connection to different ethnicities. However, Dutta
refuses to situate Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1987), The Glass Palace (2000) and
The Hungry Tide (2004) in relation to established paradigms of the postcolonial
historical novel, instead presenting them as a special subgeneric variation. Dutta
thereby draws attention to the continuous evolution of the different subgenres of
contemporary historical literature.
Attempts to categorise this literature’s principal subgenres often accompany
efforts to identify areas of the past which have exerted a particularly strong appeal.
Hence, Richard Bradford argues that three “dimensions of history” have dominated
the settings of British historical fiction since the late 1980s: the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, the Victorian period and the two World Wars (91).
4
Certain
essays in the issue engage in this debate. Christine Harrison confirms the
popularity of the early modern dimension within a British context in “Spatialising
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Christine Harrison and Angeliki Spiropoulou, Introduction
Synthesis 8 (Fall 2015) 4
Early and Late Modernity: Representations of London in Peter Ackroyd’s The
House of Dr. Dee and Hawksmoor,” while Poskitt’s plays, discussed by Flothow,
appear to illustrate the equal appeal of this dimension in popular British historical
drama since the 1990s. Meanwhile, Dutta maintains that the recent past of South
Asia has proved particularly attractive to South Asian writers since it has allowed
them to intervene in the discursive construction of South Asian nations.
Nevertheless, the past settings examined in the issue range from the second
century AD through to the 1960s, thus pointing to the diversity of periods and
dimensions that have been put to work in contemporary historical literature since
the beginnings of the ‘history turn.’
The issue also emphasises the plurality of cultural/geographical settings that
have characterised historical literature since the 1980s, revealing these settings to
be important for a variety of reasons. For example, Harrison maintains that the
London settings of Hawksmoor and The House of Dr. Dee signal the capital’s role
in both the development and contestation of modern socio-cultural forms. On the
other hand, Flothow demonstrates how Nell’s Belles: The Swinging Sixteen-Sixties
Show (2002) connects 1660s to 1960s London in order to celebrate sexual freedom,
gender equality and both religious and political toleration. Significantly, Ghosh’s
The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide are all set in locations
that witnessed subsequently repressed events, but Dutta shows how the novels
additionally gesture towards further unrepresented locations, sites of similar
events, in North East India. Rosenberg identifies comparable links between the
many cultural/geographical settings in Phillips’ The Nature of Blood. Although
Venice is a favoured symbolic topos in this novel, shifts in cultural/geographical as
well as historical setting establish multiple links between migrant identities in
different places.
Theoretical explorations
‘Postmodern’ theories of history have indubitably played a major role in the
refashioning of historical literature since the beginnings of the ‘history turn,’ an
influence highlighted by the papers in this issue. Inspired by post-structuralist
analyses as well as postmodern ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ (Lyotard xxiv),
contemporary theorists of history, including Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur,
Dominick LaCapra, Alan Munslow, Hans Kellner and Keith Jenkins, have
challenged history ‘in its mainstream realist, empiricist, objectivist, documentarist,
lower case, liberal/plural expressions’ (Jenkins 2).
5
They have identified how this
dominant paradigm makes “a fetish of archival research” (LaCapra 21) and assailed
its assumptions that documents are empirical evidence and the historian can
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Christine Harrison and Angeliki Spiropoulou, Introduction
Synthesis 8 (Fall 2015) 5
‘correctly’ interpret these documents to discover objective historical facts. Stressing
that such historical ‘facts’ necessarily assume narrative form, these theorists oppose
the idea that the reconstruction of the former may reveal the past ‘as it really was’
[wie es eigentlich gewesen ist], as the traditional positivist historian, Leopold von
Ranke, famously put it.
6
Instead, they have analysed documents as constructed
texts “freighted with cultural meanings” (Munslow 6), examined the role which the
equally situated historian plays in trace selection and interpretation, as well as fact
invention, and, following the pioneering work of Hayden White, they have shown
how facts are ‘emplotted’ according to linguistic tropes, literary generic models and
dominant cultural metaphors, producing historical narratives that have no
privileged, direct access to the past.
7
Many ‘postmodern’ analyses have also underlined the links between history and
literature, thus challenging the post-eighteenth-century divide between them. For
example, Kellner identifies not only the beginnings and endings of historical
narratives but also historical periods and events as “literary creations”(129), while
in Deconstructing History (1997), Munslow sets out to “highlight the essentially
literary nature of historical knowledge” (2). Τhe intrinsic link between literature
and history had already been pinpointed by Roland Barthes, whose article, “The
Discourse of History” (1967), posited the commonality between the two types of
discourses by reference to their common discursivity. Barthes reflects:
the narration of past events, commonly subject in our culture, since the Greeks, to the
sanction of historical ‘science’, placed under the imperious warrant of the ‘real,’
justified by principles of ‘rational’ exposition − does this narration differ, in fact, by
some specific feature, by an indubitably pertinence, from imaginary narration, as we
find it in the epic, the novel, the drama?’(127)
By revealing the rhetorical structure of historical discourse, Barthes also points to
the inherent paradox in the traditional conceptualisation of the ‘fact’ as the object
and means of historiography in that “the fact never has any but a linguistic
existence (as the term of discourse), and yet everything happens as if this linguistic
existence were merely the pure and simple ‘copy’ of another existence, situated in
an extra-structural field, the ‘real’”(138).
The comparison of history to literature, however, finds its fullest expression in
the work of Hayden White, who has problematised the status of ‘facts,’ showing
how “history is no less a form of fiction than the novel is a form of historical
representation,” (Tropics 122). Furthermore, in a much-quoted article, tellingly
entitled, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” (1974), White not only shows
that historical events are made into familiar stories using “all of the techniques that
we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play” (84), but
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he also argues that the type of story a historian tells is determined by “the
dominant figurative mode of the language he has used to describe the elements of
his account prior to his composition of a narrative” (Tropics 94). In his
groundbreaking Metahistory (1973), White had effectively problematised the
putative ‘objectivity’ of historical writing as well as the truthfulness of facts by
foregrounding the narrative nature of historiography and our always already
mediated access to the past. Drawing primarily on literary theory, White
formulated a typology of the understructure of nineteenth-century historical
writing according to dominant narrative modes, tropes of argument and ideological
strategies, thus revealing history’s dependence on rhetoric, with modern historical
thought being inscribed in the figure of irony. In his more recent collection of
studies, entitled, The Content of the Form (1987), White extended his critical
examination of historiography and philosophies of history to twentieth-century
debates and theorists such as Foucault, Ricoeur and Jameson. White has also
authored numerous insightful studies on literature itself, some of which are
collected in his 1999 book, Figural Realism, and reassess notions of historical
narration, temporality, factuality and the event by evoking their treatment in
modern literary works. The immense impact of White’s anti-positivist poetics of
history on historical and literary studies cannot be overstated. We are indeed
delighted to host an interview with him in the present issue, and discover his
thoughts about the relationship between history and literature, as is manifested in
modern and contemporary fiction.
A number of the contributions to the issue stress the influence that the
highlighted affinities between history and literature have had on the ‘history turn’
in fiction. Flothow’s essay, for example, also shows how postmodern challenges to
‘mainstream’ history have paved the way for more innovative treatments of the past
even within popular historiography, whose status in the high/popular divide, duly
deconstructed by postmodernism, has been effectively redeemed. While Flothow
reads Poskitt’s plays for children against this postmodern background, Tsetsi
highlights the influence of postmodern history on the complex photo-texts of W.G.
Sebald. She characterises The Emigrants’ narrator as the kind of idiosyncratic
historian called for by Dominick LaCapra; a figure who bears witness to testimonies
rather than examining documents since only the multiple voices of the former can
fill the narrative silence produced by the trauma of the Holocaust. It in worth
noting in this context that recent Holocaust, trauma and memory studies have been
nodal in the resurgence of the historical in literature since the 80s. More
particularly, Tetsi argues that Sebald’s text further challenges historical
orthodoxies by transforming its readers into witnessing historians who must
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interpret and connect a polyphony of voices, as well as linking these testimonies to
their own experiences of trauma through engagement with the often vague,
indeterminate photographs spaced throughout Sebald’s text.
Both Flothow’s and Tsetsi’s essays are additionally indebted to literary criticism
that has traced connections between ‘postmodern’ historiography and
contemporary historical fiction. Both Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism and
The Politics of Postmodernism (1989) occupy a special position in this critical
corpus since they also endowed a particular form of historical fiction with new
cultural significance, thus adding considerable momentum to the ‘history turn’ in
literature. Recalling Frederic Jameson’s early argument in his influential article,
“Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), Hutcheon
identifies such fiction as paradigmatic of cultural postmodernism. But whereas
Jameson describes contemporary novels as inert products of late capitalism devoid
of any historical consciousness, Hutcheon ascribes them with a degree of political
radicalism, asserting that historiographic metafiction “at once inscribes and
subverts the conventions and ideologies of the dominant cultural and social forces
of the twentieth-century western world” (Politics 11).
The papers in this issue highlight the continuing influence of Hutcheon’s
paradigm not only on contemporary literary criticism but also on historical fiction,
drama and narrative poetry since the end of the 1980s. For example, Flothow
shows how the figures of Henry VIII and Charles II “take on different,
particularised and ultimately ex-centric status” (Hutcheon, Poetics 115) in Poskitt’s
Henry the Tudor Dude (1995) and Nell’s Belles respectively, the former
transformed into a modern pop celebrity, the latter into a sex guru. While
Hutcheon’s paradigm of the political potential of historiographic metafiction is
implicit in Flothow’s essay, it is an explicit point of reference in Gendusa’s analysis
of The Emperor’s Babe. Gendusa argues that Evaristo’s novel-in-verse inserts the
silenced and excluded stories of blacks and women as well as the Roman Empire
into the history of the British nation in order to challenge the nineteenth-century
myth of ethnic homogeneity on which British national identities were built.
Whereas such analyses emphasise the interpretive force of Hutcheon’s
categorisation, other papers reveal its limitations within particular contexts.
Although Tsetsi compares the fragmented, multi-perspectival structure of The
Emigrants to that of historiographic metafiction, she argues that Sebald employs
this mode to stress not the differences but rather the analogies between diverse
experiences of trauma, thus restoring the postmodern loss of a sense of cultural
similarity. Meanwhile, Harrison claims that certain (British) novels usually defined
as historiographic metafiction are actually quite distinct, thus suggesting that
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Christine Harrison and Angeliki Spiropoulou, Introduction
Synthesis 8 (Fall 2015) 8
recourse to Hutcheon’s international paradigm sometimes “obscures distinctive
literary heritages and fails to take account of national cultural differences that exert
a powerful influence on societies and their perceptions of the world” (Lord 10).
If Harrison’s and Tsetsi’s essays highlight the need to move beyond dominant
critical paradigms when analysing certain types of contemporary historical fiction,
Dutta’s paper indicates the import of questioning assumptions about the way
(alternative) histories are used in contemporary historical literature. Dutta notes
that Ghosh’s novels are usually read as fairly straightforward articulations of
subaltern history, a practice that is closely associated with the postcolonial
(historical) novel. However, she argues that The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace
and The Hungry Tide not only represent the subaltern but also highlight the
limitations of such representations, thus producing a powerful critique of subaltern
history; while subaltern characters achieve the speech denied them by Spivak
(104), their previously repressed, alternative narrations of events are shown to
repress yet other aspects and views of the same events, and in all three novels these
silenced, repressed pasts return as ghostly presences, haunting memories and
pregnant silences.
Dutta’s contribution also illustrates how contemporary literature often features
hybrid and diasporic subjects, foregrounding the historical, spatial, and
performative conditioning of subjectivity in the wake of modernism’s fracture of
the unitary, rational and self-founding Cartesian subject. Recent trends in post-
structuralist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, historical and gender/queer theory have
forcefully interrogated the limits and vicissitudes of subjectivity, in connection to
power, locality, ethnicity, sexuality, memory and historical contexts. Traumatic,
exilic, queer and subaltern experiences have displaced the previously Euro-centric
model of the subject and exposed the foreignness constitutive of subjectivity.
The Foucaultian conceptualisation of the subject as ‘produced’ through time-
specific power that permeates discourse and everyday practices has also been
pivotal in politically aware, contemporary literary articulations of subjectivity as
localised, contingent, mutable and historically constructed (Foucault). Notions of
gender or national purity are thrown into question by the hybrid and positional
subject configurations found in contemporary historical literature, as pointed out
in Rosenberg’s discussion of what she terms the “postcolonial Jew,” or as evident in
the demystifying historisation of national British and Asian identities in the
contributions of Gendusa and Dutta respectively. In addition, postcolonial and
psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity inform a great part of contemporary
literature which focuses on (auto)-biography, memory, trauma, the Holocaust and
experiences of displacement. Texts like Sebald’s, discussed here by Tetsi, privilege
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the past as the site not only of action but also of the meaning of the (subject’s)
present, linking individual with collective memory. However, such literature
reveals that the past always comes down to us in some narrative form, showing up
fictional characters or poetic subjects as intertextual fragments or voices. And, at
the same time, the denaturalisation of the subject and a univocal past effected in
most contemporary historical literature throws into relief subjects and voices
repressed by official history, leading to the latter’s own revision.
In dialogue with the past
By exploring the complications of the past, the literature examined in this issue
simultaneously problematises the experience of the present. Gendusa stresses this
aspect of The Emperor’s Babe, showing how the novel-in-verse links complicated
questions of gendered racialisation in Roman Britain to equally complex issues in
twenty-first century Black British Feminism. However, just as the verse novel’s
representation of the Roman past illuminates the present, so the present sheds new
light on the Roman past, thus creating a past-present dialogue which also echoes
LaCapra’s description of historiography as “a ‘conversational’ exchange with the
past” (36). Such past-present dialogues are a central feature of the other literary
texts examined in this issue, thus underlining their importance in contemporary
historical fiction, drama and narrative poetry since the 1980s.
Every dialogue between a particular past and present is built on a specific set of
ideas of their relationship. Hence, texts may thematically and/or formally invoke
the difference of the past to indicate how “those features of our arrangements
which we may be disposed to accept as traditional or even ‘timeless’ truths may in
fact be the merest contingencies of our peculiar history and social structure”
(Skinner 67). Alternatively, they may highlight the similarities between past and
present, either to trace the roots of the present in the past or to establish historical
parallels between particular pasts and presents, thus resonating the Benjaminean
conception of history as a construct of the present, as his own ‘constellatory’
method suggests (1940). The essays in this issue examine literary texts that
construct all three types of relationship, and several also show how these types can
be combined. For example, Tetsi argues that The Emigrants both traces the roots
of the narrative present in a traumatic past and employs the “pictorial third” to
establish parallels between diverse historical experiences of trauma. Similarly,
Harrison demonstrates how Hawksmoor and The House of Dr. Dee explore the
continuities and differences between the early modern past and late modern
present, as well as establishing specific historical parallels between these two
dimensions.
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The potential of literary past-present dialogues to intervene in contemporary
debates and shape both the attitudes and actions of receivers is another important
focus of the issue. It is perhaps most fully explored in Dutta’s essay, for she shows
how The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace and The Hungry Tide not only ‘speak’
silenced histories and reveal the repressions in these speech acts, but have also
played important interventionist roles in the areas whose histories they either
explicitly or implicitly rewrite. Her principal example is The Shadow Lines, whose
setting she describes as a mirror image of Assam and which was published in the
wake of the Assam Movement against illegal migrants (1979-1983). Dutta argues
that the novel’s popularity in the region enabled it to mould political and cultural
discourses on migration and citizenship, thus influencing responses to migrants.
By stressing the interventionist role that Ghosh’s historical novel has played in
Assam, Dutta highlights not only its relation to attitudes and actions but also its
potential (through these) to create different futures. The future orientation of much
contemporary historical literature is further explored in other essays and thus
constitutes a final focus of the issue. For example, Harrison lends support to Steven
Connor’s claim that contemporary British fiction frequently traces “lines of
connection from imagined or narrated pasts into speculative futures” (137); she
shows how Hawksmoor and The House of Dr. Dee direct their readers away from
(modern) rationality to the alternative ways of seeing and being that are immanent
within the surviving pre-modern spaces of Ackroyd’s late twentieth-century
London.
Although this issue of Synthesis cannot hope to examine all of the ways in which
contemporary historical literature has linked the past to the future, just as it cannot
hope to explore all the diverse forms such literature has taken in different regions
of the world, it nevertheless speaks to current critical debate since it surveys central
developments in genre, forms of historical representation, the exploration of
identities and the construction of past-present dialogues within a range of
contemporary historical literature, as well as assessing the validity of central
literary critical paradigms. The issue’s focus on historical literature from the 1980s,
1990s and twenty-first century also enables the tracing of both continuities in form,
structure and theme and the many new directions that have characterised various
stages of what is now a historical period in its own right. Since the ‘turn to history’
shows no signs of abating, such a survey also anticipates some of the future
directions that literature might take in its ever-dynamic engagement with history.
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1
See, for example, Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in Figural Realism (66-86).
2
An apt illustration of this trend is Jerome De Groot's The Historical Novel (2010), which
surveys developments in historical fiction over the past forty years under chapter headings
such as “Genre Fiction,” “Literary Fiction and History” and “Postmodernism and the
historical novel: history as fiction, fiction as history.”
3
For example, in “The Historical Turn in British Fiction” (2006), Suzanne Keen identifies
women’s historical romances, traditional historical novels and postmodern historical fiction
as the three major subgenres of historical fiction in contemporary Britain, while Jerome de
Groot categorises contemporary British (and wider Anglophone) historical fiction into
subgenres of popular fiction aimed at men and women, literary fiction and postmodern
writing in his 2010 study The Historical Novel (2-3).
4
Bradford employs the term “dimensions of history” to signify areas of the past that are “too
broad and elastic to be termed 'periods'” (91).
5
Also see, Elizabeth Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic
Turn (2004).
6
This is the governing principle of Ranke’s Histories of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples
1494-1514.
7
See, for example, Hayden White’s “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,”
included in his book Figural Realism (27-42), alongside his seminal, Metahistory (1973). In
“Language and Historical Representation,” Hans Kellner summarises some of the central
cultural metaphors employed in history writing: “the organic figures of growth, life-cycles,
roots, seeds, and so on; the figures of time with their rises and falls, weather catastrophes,
seasons, twilights; the figures of movement (flow of events, crossroads, wheels); the
technical figures of construction, gears, chains; theatrical figures of stage, actor, contexts.
Most of all, of course, the figure of History as pedagogic, ever ‘teaching’ lessons” (135).
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist. Austen: U of Texas P, 1981.
Barthes, Roland. “The Discourse of History” (1963). The Rustle of Language.
Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1986. 127-48.
Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History” (1940). Selected Writings 4:1938-
1940. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and Others. Ed. Howard Eiland and
Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006. 389-400.
Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007.
Clark, Elizabeth. History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004.
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