ABSTRACT
Postmodernism has changed the way we research and write history – it has changed the agenda of history, our understanding of its functions, the topics studied, the sources used and the way it is taught. History has become more interdisciplinary, more inclusive and broader in the range of methodologies and sources used. Despite the worries of some more traditional historians, this change is not something to fear. As we saw in Chapter 2, changes to the practice of history are nothing new, historical cultures and mnemonic practices are fl uid and fl exible and have differed between communities, times and places. The dominant form of academic history today is not a naturally occurring, inevitable way of imagining the past. It is a contingent, historicised product of its times – a way of narrating the ‘before now’ which was useful for what people wanted to do with the past in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but which has since lost some of its applicability. Not all historians writing new, innovative, experimental histories are happy to call themselves postmodernists. Not all embrace the epistemological changes that we believe postmodernism points to. All, however, have been affected and infl uenced in some way by postmodernism and tend to see the genre of history as comprising a series of often contested narratives which depict our pasts within
a rather fl exible (and contingent) methodological framework. Dening, for example does not refer to himself as a postmodernist, instead he prefers the term neo-modernist, where his conception of neo-modernity ‘begins with the real and enlarges it with imagination’.2
