![]() ![]() For White, the narrativization of history “is intimately related to, if not a function of, the impulse to moralize reality, that is, to identify it with the social system that is the source of any morality that we can imagine” (14). ![]() He points out that taking historical events and weaving them into a grand narrative that fits into a modern conception of a neat story is not a very “scientific” way of doing history. In White’s first chapter, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” he considers the drawbacks in the use of narrative in the discipline of history. As I consider this distinction further, I have been reading Hayden White’s The Content of the Form. The Brut texts, which give accounts of King Lear and King Arthur, as well as containing their fair share of giants and dragons, trouble the divide between history and literature. The text is translated from the Anglo-Norman Brut, which in turn drew material from sources such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, but many versions eventually continue into the historical present of their recorders. ![]() Recently I have been reading and thinking quite a bit about medieval English chronicles, especially the Middle English Prose Brut and its predecessors. ![]()
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