ABSTRACT
A consideration of historical genres is becoming increasingly relevant to our current conception of history.1 Nevertheless, while substantial criticism on literary genres exists, this issue has been generally neglected in historiography. This may be explained, in part, by the fact that historians have traditionally tended to conceive of genres and modes of writing as rigid structures within which they locate their texts, and as categories which readers recognize and negotiate as they receive the texts, rather than as epistemic options. Thus, historians generally consider themselves mediators between the past and the present rather than as authors and producers of referential, but narrative, texts. Classifying their texts according to genre was therefore considered a specious exercise.
