Theories of History, Models of Historiography

  • Angeliki Spiropoulou
Chapter

Abstract

‘History’ as a term combines the ontological with the epistemological in as much as it refers both to the past and our representations of the past. Since we only have access to the past through its representations, historiographical methodology necessarily evokes questions addressed by the philosophy of history. Such questions concern the nature of historical temporality, crucially coupled with some notion of the possible direction of history and of the appropriate subject of history writing. These in turn determine how a historian conceives the relation between the present and the past, the possible meaning of human history, the possibility of objectivity and the role of interpretation in historiography. While a thorough presentation of the varieties of historical thought and historiography is well beyond the scope of this book, it may be useful to present schematically, and perforce reductively, fundamental legacies, trends and assumptions in the writing and the philosophy of history that were influential or still effective at the time of Woolf and Benjamin, in order to place and bring into relief their own thinking about history and their representations of the past.

Keywords

Historical Time Cultural History Literary History Historical Materialism Historical Object 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Utility and Liability of History for Life’, in Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 86; also cited by Benjamin as an epigraph to his ‘Thesis XII’ (in Illuminations, p. 251, in a different translation).Google Scholar
  2. 2.
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    Leonard Woolf had noted, for example, that Carlyle had shifted the study of history to ‘how men lived and had their being’, of which Leslie Stephen seemed to approve, as is proved by his dedication to including obscure figures in his Dictionary of National Biography. Cf. Hill T, ‘Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen’, especially, pp. 360–1. Also cf. Carlyle, ‘On History’, in Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History (New York: The World Publishing, 1972), pp. 90–107. Significantly, Woolf started her Common Reader series of essays by explicitly evoking Dr Johnson’s polemical concurrence with the common reader in the Life of Gray.Google Scholar
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  33. 65.
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© Angeliki Spiropoulou 2010

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  • Angeliki Spiropoulou

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