Representation, Narrative and Emplotment

The considerations which this chapter addresses follow on naturally and sequentially from those of representation, and overlap at a number of points. However the concepts discussed here are a special case of representation, particularly applicable to historiography. One of the advances with which postmodernism thinking can be credited as having contributed to historiographical theory is to ‘problematise’— to employ the horrible neologism — the question of what historians are doing when they use narrative technique. That, although closely related to the issues discussed in the previous chapter, is not quite the same thing, but represents a separate and additional consideration in the matter of what historians’ purposes may be when they write history. Here questions of source availability, source multiplicity, choice of material, can be bracketed off, so to speak, in order to focus upon the question of how the chosen materials are organised into an intelligible account of events and/or circumstances in the past and what the theoretical implications might be.