This article argues that to the extent that a representation is historical it is necessarily selective or incomplete with respect to the real world: not everything is known and not everything known can be included in discourse. It follows from the incompleteness of historical representations that historians and readers may more or less thematize what has been left out of a historical text: what it ignores or fails to understand. Through an analysis of the manner in which Thomas Carlyle thematized (...) his own ignorance in the face of the past, it is argued that the very limitedness of historical writing may be the source of a distinct aesthetic effect, the historical sublime. This effect is particular to historical writing and rooted in its cognitive function, although it may also be simulated for rhetorical purposes. (shrink)

Over the last fifty years there has been much discussion about the value of narrative in the production of historical knowledge whereby it is generally assumed that “narrative” is a given and that the only thing at issue is its epistemological value. This article critically examines this assumption. It shows how conceptions of “narrative” have mutated in response to changes in cultural practice and, as importantly, how they have been implicitly modeled on the particular medium envisaged for telling stories: the (...) stand-alone monograph. The belief that history's natural form is a book written by an individual historian has thus informed most discussions of narrative in the twentieth century, meaning that the primacy of language, the autonomy of the author, and the finished, self-contained character of the work have been taken for granted. The “naturalness” of the stand-alone monograph can no longer be taken as a given, however, in the new media ecologies. Digitization and the internet offer new technologies for producing and disseminating historical knowledge and, in the process, present both opportunities and challenges to professional historians. Beyond their practical implications, the digital media also provide a new theoretical model for viewing historical narrative in terms of its social production by multiple agents across different platforms, and this changes our understanding both of past and of future practices. (shrink)