Munslow - Narrative and History

Narrative and History

Theory and History
Series Editor: Donald MacRaild

Published

Further titles are in preparation

Theory and History
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ISBN 1403987289
ISBN 9781403987280
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Alun Munslow

Alun Munslow 2007

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ISBN-13: 9781403987280
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As always, for Jane

The completion of any book is an opportunity to thank those who have been a part of its creation. My thanks, therefore, to Robert A. Rosenstone, Keith Jenkins and Beverley Southgate, who gave me the benefit of their thoughts on earlier drafts of this book. I also thank them for showing me, in their different ways, how it is possible to rethink history. More recently I have benefited from working with David Harlan as the US co-editor of Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice. There are also many other friends and colleagues with whom, for over 30 years of teaching, I shared the academic grind. My thanks to them all. However, I wish particularly to acknowledge the collegiality and the friendship of Owen R. Ashton.

The aim of this book is very simple. It is to explain how historians make, and specifically, writehistory. By that I mean what rules, procedures, figurative and compositional techniques do historians follow and what decisions do they make in order to turn the past into that narrative about it we choose to call history? It follows from what I have just said that the basic assumption behind the book is that history is a form of narrative written by historians. Professional historians are generally well aware of the construction of historical explanations especially the basics of hunting out the sources and the most appropriate ways to work out what they mean. Indeed, many historians have written at length about the techniques of source analysis and inference. However, discussions of the nature of history as a narrative-making exercise have primarily been left to a few philosophers of history who have an interest in what seem to be matters largely irrelevant to practitioners who actually do the job. Because of this deficiency, I offer in this book an introduction to the nature of the history narrative. That requires that I outline the rules of, and functional relationships that exist in, the actual writing of history as a narrative form. I will be illustrating this mainly from twentieth-century historiography.

Clearly, there are many kinds of written as well as non-written narratives. There are novels, films, comics, digital games, university lectures, church windows, ballet, dramatic play, annual reports of accounts and, of course, histories. It is because history is a species of narrative that it is useful to examine how it is created and how it relates to the claims usually made that history explains and offers meaningful interpretations about the past. When we have a general guide to the writing of history, we are better placed to understand how individual histories work and can assess their claims to understanding the nature of the past.

Precisely because history is a form of literature the rules of historical writing or, to be precise, historical authorship are derived from the nature, production and operation of narrative. Though occasionally modified according to the peculiarities of the discipline, the history narrative as with all narratives is concerned with the general process of representation. While, no doubt, a few historians remain blissfully unaware of the status of historical writing as a mode of representation, happily most understand that their fundamental task is the construction of a narrative about the past. It is for this reason that all students of history should have access to a primer that describes that activity. Though this book is necessarily brief, my approach is holistic because I address the theory and practice of historical authorship and historical representation within which the empirical, the analytical and all other aspects of historical study are encompassed.

As you will probably be aware, most what is history? texts still tend to begin with how historians find out what happened in the past according to the sources. They then explain why events occurred as they did and, most important of all, interpret what it all means with the results or findings of this complex activity the explanation and meaning then being put into a prose narrative. In other words, this simple mechanism is said to reproduce the coherent reality of the past, which is then rendered with analytical objectivity as a historical narrative that conveys the most likely truth