ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the ‘narrative’ concept that permits the historian to enable them to turn the past into a history, which is the concept of the fictive that defines and describes the notions of the ‘imaginative’ and/or the ‘imaginary’. The fictive is, more often than not, a rather peculiar notion but one which turns out to be essential to ‘doing history’. The concept of the fictive both unavoidably and invariably engages historians whether they realise it or not. This terminology of the fictive enables historians to deploy the notion of the ‘historical imagination’ most clearly and seems to be about creating possibilities in the past.
