Abstract
The question of whether ‘the discipline of history is essentially a narrative mode of knowing, understanding, explaining and reconstructing the past’ has been described as ‘the most important and central debate in the philosophy of history since the 1960s’.1 As this debate has developed, historiography has undergone a linguistic turn inspired by structuralist and poststructuralist thought, leading to the emergence of so-called post-modernist history.2 Since the 1980s this has had a considerable impact on how literary scholars and novelists have thought about the past, provoking a historical turn evident in new historicism and the emergence of historiographic metafiction.
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Notes
Geoffrey Roberts, ‘Introduction’, in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (2001), 1.
On the recent history of historiography, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988)
Georg Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century ( Hanover, NH, 1997 )
Elizabeth A. Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA, 2004 )
Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, 2005); The Postmodern History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins (1997).
See Ulric Neisser, ‘Self-Narratives: True and False’, in The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-narrative, ed. Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush (Cambridge, 1994), 1–18.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968), 13.
Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt a.M., 2000), 247–8, 249; my translation.
David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985) surveys responses to survivals from the past.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’, in Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff (Harmondsworth, 1982), 35
cf. Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’; Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben’, in Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (München, 1969), I, 209–85
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York, 1973).
Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford, 1988), 1.
Keith Jenkins, ‘A Postmodern Reply to Perez Zagorin’, History and Theory, 39 (2000) 181–200; 184
F.R. Ankersmit, ‘Reply to Professor Zagorin’, History and Theory, 29 (1990) 275–96.
Compare, for example, C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History (1998), 5, 33.
Peter Gay, Style in History (New York, 1974), 210; quoted in Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 48.
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe ( Baltimore, MD, 1973 ), 6.
See F.R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, 2001), passim
John Zammito. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, 2001), passim
John Zammito, ‘Ankersmit and Historical Representation’, History and Theory, 44 (2005) 155–81
Compare McCullagh, The Truth of History, 23, 114. On collective assumptions, see Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (2002), 66–72; on intersubjective acceptability, see Fulbrook, Historical Theory, 107–21; Zammito, ‘Ankersmit and Historical Representation’, 177–81. White dismisses such arguments in Tropics, 97.
See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge [1979] (Manchester, 1984). Earlier critiques of metanarratives, from Ranke’s in 1824 to Karl Popper and Karl Löwith, are noted in Perez Zagorin, ‘History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now’, History and Theory, 38 (1999) 1–24; 6–7.
W.H. Walsh, Philosophy of History: An Introduction, rev. edn (New York, 1967), 59–63; W.H. Walsh, ‘Colligatory Concepts in History’, in The Philosophy of History, ed. Patrick Gardiner (Oxford, 1974 ), 127–44.
David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln, NE, 2002), 89 and Ch. 3 passim.
David Carr, ‘Narrative and the Real World: An Argument for Continuity’, History and Theory, 25 (1986) 117–31; quotations below from 122, 125. Cf. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, I, 16–22.
Kathleen Canning, ‘Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience’, Signs, 19 (1994) 368–404; 369.
Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 [1976] (1998); quotations in this paragraph from 93, 95, 92, 94, 95.
Patrick H. Hutton, ‘The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History’, History and Theory, 20 (1981) 237, 238.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 28. Greenblatt discusses Geertz’s influence in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago, 2000), 20–31.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York, 1972), 191.
These traditions are analysed in Christopher Lloyd, The Structures of History ( Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1993 )
Malcolm Waters, Modern Sociological Theory (1994)
Nicos P. Mouzelis, Modern and Postmodern Social Theorizing: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge, 2008 ); The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Chichester, 2009 ).
See John B. Thompson, ‘The Theory of Structuration’, in Social Theory of Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and his Critics, ed. David Held and John B. Thompson (Cambridge, 1989 ), 56–76.
Louis O. Mink, ‘Philosophical Analysis and Historical Understanding’, Review of Metaphysics, 21 (1968) 667–98; 691.
Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York, 2007), 294.
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© 2011 Alan David Robinson
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Robinson, A. (2011). The Narrative Turn in History. In: Narrating the Past. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230316744_1
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