Klio und ihr e anmutigen Schwestern: Zum Verhältnis von Literaturwissenschaft, Literatur und Geschichtswissenschaft

Abstract

Since several well known critics have recently declared that the golden age of literary theory has come to an end, this might be the moment to rethink a theoretical problem that attracted some interest in the academic world from the late 1970s to the early 1990s: the relationship between historiography and literary criticism. Although the histoire des mentalites has given the literary text an unprecedented status in the reconstruction of the collective imaginary and although the discussion of similarities between forms of narrative in historical and fictional texts has undoubtedly intensifi ed the dialogue between historiography and literary criticism, some aspects have been overlooked in the debate of the last twenty to thirty years. First, for both types of texts, fictional as well as historiographic, the wide range of narrative and representational strategies has not been taken into account; second, more recent narratological methods of analysis have not been applied to historiographic texts; third, the interest for the narrative character of historiographic texts can be found almost exclusively among literary critics and philosophers and much less among historians; and fourth, the analysis of narrative structures inside and outside the limits of fictional writing has eclipsed the main characteristic of literary texts, their inherent potential to produce pleasure.