This is a literary study of historical writing. A few preliminary remarks on the relation between history-writing and ‘literature’ may therefore be in order. ‘For a long time’, as Lionel Gossman writes of pre-1800 discursive practice, ‘the relation of history to literature was not notably problematic. History was a branch of literature’ (1978:3). We might add that, for the best part of the last 150 years, the relationship between the writing of history and the writing of literature has been equally unproblematic - but for quite the opposite reason: history and literature being apparently of such separate orders, there was no common ground between them worth making an issue of. As a result, the literary or discursive dimension of history-writing has for long been ignored: on the one hand, by literary scholars, whose concern has been almost exclusively with the traditional ‘literary’ genres of prose fiction, drama, poetry; on the other hand, by historians, for whom the role of discourse in the constitution of historical knowledge has not been of particular theoretical importance.

The appearance of an essay such as Gossman's - pregnantly entitled ‘History and Literature: Reproduction or Signification?’ - indicates that the relationship between ‘history’ and ‘literature’ has become an issue again. The question raised in his title reflects recent developments in the concept and study of discourse (its extension beyond the confines of ‘literary’ works) and the growing interest, on the part of literary theorists as well as historians, in the role which discourse plays in historiographical practice.