ABSTRACT
Reading certain theoretical works of the past few decades, one might be forgiven for thinking that until the later twentieth century, everybody had agreed that historical accounts were simply accepted as True Stories containing Important Facts about Things Which Really Happened. History was, at least since the more scientistic turn of the twentieth century, a discipline quite distinct from literature. Literature was about things that had not happened, and history was about things that had. Literature was about imagination and invention; history was about telling the truth. Historians wrote about facts, to be clearly distinguished from fiction and myth. And, on this allegedly traditional view, historians were trained to do it properly, objectively; using appropriate sources and methodology (known by critics as ‘source fetishism’), with appropriate time spent sweating in the archives (‘archive positivism’), their results could be trusted. Then along came some theoretically sophisticated postmodernists, much influenced by French post-structuralism, who mounted a mortal attack on this happy picture of historians earnestly in pursuit of truth. With the ‘linguistic turn’, history dissolved into relativist discourse; the ‘truth’ could not only never be known, but was indeed itself merely an article of faith. Historical works were essentially fictions written in realist mode, with conventions such as quotations from sources and scholarly footnotes serving to bolster the reality effect. Meanwhile, however, the vast majority of practising historians ignored the unintelligible theorists, and simply got on with the job of reconstructing the past; and their readers continued to read their books as if they had something interesting and accurate to say about the past.
