Histories, Micro- and Literary: Problems of Genre and Distance

Abstract

History is usually assumed to be a single, unified, and rather decorous genre, but a strong case can be made for thinking of historical writing as a family of overlapping and competing genres, “low” as well as “high.” Membership in this family changes over time, but in addition to national history it has included such bodies of writing as philosophical history, memoir, biography, literary history, and antiquities. What, then, differentiates these genres? Since all histories deal with temporality and the modifications of temporal distance, the construction of historical distance is a central feature of all forms of historical representation and as such provides a key reference point for historiographical analysis. The essay review two important cases of genre formation – literary history in early nineteenth-century Britain and micro-history in late twentieth century Europe and the United States – in order to show how attention to the construction of historical distance provides an analytic tool for examining some of the key features of these two emergent genres of historical writing.