Border Crossings
History, Fiction, and Dead Certainties
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4496429 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Cushing Strout (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1992 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 153 |
| Publication date | 1992-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History and Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2656 • E-ISSN: 1468-2303 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2505594 |
| OpenAlex | W2323181674 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
Simon Schama's Dead Certainties is assessed in light of complex relationship between history and fiction, which share some limited common territory. Examples are cited from Mary Chesnut, Oscar Handlin, Georg Lukacs, Herman Melville, Robert Penn Warren, P. D. James, and Wallace Stegner. Schama's book has some kinship to skepticism found in the new historicism and deconstruction, but also has its own differences from fashionable inverted positivism which concludes that since evidence is not an open window on reality, it must be a wall precluding access to it. Only two of Schama's three narratives cohere, and while uncertainty may be a common theme, his historian's judgment tends to dissipate much of mystery his fictionalizing technique creates. His idea of historical uncertainty arises from a fallacy that a communion with dead (as in Henry James's The Sense of Past), possible only for a time-traveler, represents authentic knowledge. Affirming that asking questions and relating narratives are not mutually exclusive, Schama joins company of philosophers (Collingwood, Dray, Mink, Ricoeur) and historians (Hexter, John Lukacs, Veyne, and Strout) who have also made this case
Art · Literature · History · Research, Science, and Academia
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,22 |
| Citation span | 1994 - 2017 (24) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |