History and Narration: Looking Back from the Twentieth Century

The volume considers a wide range of narrative texts from the English-speaking world in their connection with historiography and historical discurse. The critical use of history is differently tackled by twentieth-centiry authors, out of their awareness of the biased nature of many historical accounts. On the whole, the essays reveal a continuous thread in the readings of history produced during the twentieth century. Many writers tried to counteract the illuministic and positivist notion that history can be truly and reliably written, sharing the notion that history and narration are deeply imbricated and that their relationship, while assigning to the narrator and the historian equal dignity, once more assigns to the writer the responsibility of reliability as far as hard facts are concerned.