ABSTRACT
Beginning in the 1960s the American writer faced the kind of imaginative crisis identified by Doris Lessing as ‘the thinning of language against the density of our experience’. But about the same time that writers like Barth and Sukenick were advising their contemporaries to leave realism to the social scientists, semiologists and historians were beginning to question the traditional distinctions between history and fiction. In different ways, Roland Barthes and Hayden White attacked the special status of history as representation of reality by noting the similarity between the linguistic structures and rhetorical strategies of historical and imaginative writing. Doctorow was calling attention to one of the most remarkable developments in recent fiction: the creation of a new kind of historical novel. The social historian Herbert Guttman pointed to yet another crisis in the contemporary writing of American history: the failure of scholars to reach an audience beyond their own limited professional membership.
