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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Histories and novels are old allies, but the alliance is now troubled. The historian C. Vann Woodward told a convention of historians a decade ago that “our kindship is actually much closer to novelists” than to social scientists. Both the novel and history, he pointed out, “sprang from a common parentage of story-telling” and “competed with each other to satisfy the demand for historical understanding.” Over the last two centuries, he maintained, “novelists have been becoming ever more deeply historically conscious.” In the same year in which Woodward's remarks were published another historian, Sigfried Kracauer, struck a different note. The pioneers of the modern novel, Joyce, Proust, and Woolf, he observed, “no longer care to render biographical developments and chronological sequences after the manner of the older novel; on the contrary, they resolutely decompose (fictitious) continuity over time.” Thus modern art has “radically challenged the artistic ideals from which the general historian draws his inspiration—from which he must draw it to establish his genre.” But Kracauer explicitly cautioned against confusing his observations with attempts to “question the faithfulness to reality of the general historian's accounts.” He only drew the conclusion that general, large-scale narrative history as a genre survives only because metaphysical and political interests invite the historian to look at the past “from above” as a whole, instead of looking at it “from below” in the form of analytical specialized histories.
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