Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse

Berkhofer Jr., Robert F.

ISBN 10: 0674069072 / ISBN 13: 9780674069077

Published by Belknap Press, 1995

About this Item

hardcover with dust jacket, tight, shelf and edge wear, corners bumped, some pen underlining and margin marks, packaged in cardboard box for shipment, tracking on U.S. orders.

Seller Inventory # 98971

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse
• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674069072
• ISBN 13: 9780674069077
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Good
• Weight: 23 ounces

About this title

Synopsis

What legitimate form can history take when faced by the severe challenges issued in recent years by literary, rhetorical, multiculturalist, and feminist theories? That is the question considered in this long-awaited and pathbreaking book. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., addresses the essential practical concern of contemporary historians; he offers a way actually to go about reading and writing histories in light of the many contesting theories.

Berkhofer ranges through a vast archive of recent writings by a broad range of authors. He explicates the opposing paradigms and their corresponding dilemmas by presenting in dialogue form the positions of modernists and postmodernists, formalists and deconstructionists, textualists and contextualists. Poststructuralism, the New Historicism, the New Anthropology, the New Philosophy of History--these and many other approaches are illuminated in new ways in these comprehensive, interdisciplinary explorations.

From them, Berkhofer arrives at a clear vision of the forms historical discourse might take, advocates a new approach to historical criticism, and proposes new forms of historical representation that encompass multiculturalism, poetics, and reflexive (con)textualization. He elegantly blends traditional and new methodology; assesses what the "revival of the narrative" actually entails; considers the politics of disciplinary frameworks; and derives coherent new approaches to writing, teaching, reviewing, and reading histories.

About the Author

Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., is Professor of History at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His many publications include Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787-1962, A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis;, and The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present.