ABSTRACT
Experiments in writing history? An oxymoron, surely? No writers have clung more firmly (desperately, even) to traditional forms than those academic historians whose professed aim is to accurately reconstruct the past. While the discipline has in the past century undergone an enormous expansion in methodologies of research and areas of focus, opening up fields and topics little dreamed of by earlier generations (e.g. quantitative, social, gender, ethnic, cultural, subaltern, postcolonial, feminist, queer, and leisure histories, to name but a few), the means of presenting the findings of historical research has altered little. The monographs and synthetic works that historians produce continue, for the most part, to tell the past as stories narrated in the third person, linear stories with a clear sense of cause and effect, and a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories based, as Hayden White pointed out some four decades ago, on the model of the nineteenth-century novel.
