The Past as Text by Gabrielle M Spiegel
Postmodernism has challenged historians to look at historical texts in a new way, and to be skeptical of the claim that one can confidently retrieve "fact" from historical writings. In "The Past as Text" historian Gabrielle M. Spiegel sets out to read long-familiar mediaeval histories and chronicles in light of the critical-theoretical problems raised by postmodernism. At the same time she urges a method of analysis that enables the reader to recognize these texts simultaneously as artifice and as works deeply embedded in a historically determinate, knowable social world. Arguing for the "social logic of the text", Spiegel provides historians with a way to retrieve the social significance and conceptual claims produced by these mediaeval writings. Spiegel begins by providing the theoretical basis for the study of mediaeval historiography. She then demonstrates this theory in practice, offering readings of mediaeval histories and chronicles as literary, social and political constructions. Spiegel concludes that the historian should be equally aware of the discursive nature, literary modes and ideological investments of such texts as the social circumstances to which they were applied and by which they were generated.-
Writing History, Writing Trauma
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Hypertext 2.0
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What's Wrong with Postmodernism?
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Subversive Pleasures
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Death and Representation
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Food for Thought
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France and the Holy Land
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Hypertext 3.0
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Interrupted Dialectic
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The Audience
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Suburban Ambush
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Perpetual Motion
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The Aesthetics of Murder
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On the Edge of the Cliff
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The Well-Tempered Self
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Heterocosmica
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Grotesque Figures
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Passions of the Sign
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Color of Melancholy
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Gilles Deleuze
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Styles of Enlightenment
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Revolutionary Acts
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The Fate of Carmen
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Fictional Truth
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Torrid Zones
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Fortune's Faces
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The Cryptographic Imagination
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Cultural Imperialism
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The Office of the Scarlet Letter
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The Frame of Art
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Rules for the Endgame
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National Culture and the New Global System
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Decadent Subjects
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Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism
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The Translator's Turn
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The Transparent Society
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Albert Cohen
"Successful in its entirety, as parts and as a wholeIt is lucid, acute, deeply humane in the author's ongoing project of understanding the medieval past and the history-making present. It is a reader-friendly book in the very best sense. It is good theory and good history: postmodernism without apocalyptic posing, exhilarating and humane."--Nancy F. Partner, McGill University
Gabrielle M. Spiegel is professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of 'The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis: A Survey' and 'Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France.'
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780801855559 |
| ISBN 10 | 0801855551 |
| Title | The Past as Text |
| Author | Gabrielle M Spiegel |
| Series | Parallax: Re-Visions Of Culture And Society |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Johns Hopkins University Press |
| Year published | 1997-06-23 |
| Number of pages | 320 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |