ABSTRACT
The idea that the past is a plaything of the present, or, as postmodernist theory would have it, a 'metafiction', is only beginning to impinge on the consciousness and disturb the tranquillity of professional historians. But it has been for some twenty years or more a commonplace of epistemological criticism, and a very mainspring of experimental work in literature and the arts. The idea of playing with the past – whether by animatronics, dressing up in period costume, or historical re-enactment – is deeply offensive to the historian, while the attempt to abolish or suspend temporality seems to put the historian's vocation into question. History is an allegorical as well as – in intention at least – a mimetic art. History has always been a hybrid form of knowledge, syncretizing past and present, memory and myth, the written record and the spoken word. History owes much of its vitality to parallel movements in literature and politics.
