Abstract

Until recently, the philosophy of history has involved large patterns spanning many centuries and covering phenomena on a large scale of integration. In the last decade, however, the focus has shifted to concerns more in line with Collingwood than with Toynbee. The question of what constitutes historical explanation, for example, has taken on a new look. One reason is that historians themselves have begun to forsake the ideal of history as a social science for the old-fashioned notion of history as narrative. Another is that structuralists and semiologists have shown a great interest in exploring the nature of storytelling. Philosophers and practicing historians like Louis Mink, Hayden White, Peter Munz, or Frederick Olafson have turned from the model of the sciences-especially as reflected in the Annales school or the American strain of cliometrics--and found more viable possibilities in literary criticism. Thus they return history to the bosom of the humanities, sometimes even describing it without shame as a form of literature. Two journals, Clio and History and Theory have been hospitable to this point of view; and the hospitality has been repaid in kind by the editors of New Literary History, in whose pages some of the same writers have appeared. Contemporary with the literary critics who have marked out a new field called "narratology," these theorists have begun to explore concepts like plot, theme, and style; they are interested in defining event not as something that really was but as something that is historical because it can be talked about in a certain way.