ABSTRACT
This is a problem that Tolstoy grappled with 130 years ago in both the philosophical and the narrativehistorical sections of War and Peace. We have in the meantime become that much more accustomed to regarding history as narrative, as well as looking for the tropological operations in the presentation of the stories that comprise historiography; all the more so since the work of Hayden White and his poststructuralist epigones. Now, as we wade ever deeper into the new world disorder of the nervous (and naughty?) nineties, we have had to contend with what Francis Fukuyama has termed ‘the end of history’ and Michael Ignatieff is wont to gloss, in the wake too of Lyotard, as ‘the end of the grand narratives’.
