How Historians Begin: Openings in

Historical Discourse
hist_492

399..417

TREVOR DEAN
Roehampton University
Abstract
Why is the problem of beginning much discussed in literary scholarship not dealt with
in similar depth by historians? This article attempts an answer to this question, and does
so in three ways. First, it examines literary scholarship on textual openings, showing the
various ways in which the beginning is given significance. Then, it examines and challenges the common presentation of historical discourse as distinct from fiction. Finally, it
examines two sets of data: the openings of 100 historical monographs are analysed for
their fictionality, and the openings of 200 research articles are analysed for their rhetorical structures.

he difficulty of beginning has a long history. The second-century

orator and historian Aelius Aristides, faced with the problem of
commencing an oration in praise of Athens, urged the sophistic
argument that there are always many beginnings to any topic: The
argument reveals many beginnings almost everywhere, which cannot be
used simultaneously.1 This device to avoid prioritizing (while in fact
prioritizing) was later pirated by Leonardo Bruni in his celebrated earlyfifteenth-century work in praise of the city of Florence.2 Yet historians
are always faced with the issue of having to tear into the seamless web
of the past, as F. W. Maitland called it, aware that their textual beginnings and those of the events they tell cannot coincide.3 History, as Jacob
Burckhardt remarked, is the one field of study in which one cannot begin
at the beginning.4 The problematics of beginnings are much studied by
literary scholars, who insist on the memorability of opening lines and on
the significance of the part to the whole of fictional texts; but historians
1

P. Aelius Aristides, The Complete Works, trans. C. Behr (2 vols., Leiden, 19816), i. 6.
. . . many orators say that they themselves do not know where to begin . . . it is not an easy thing
to say which subject is to be treated first (Panegyric to the City of Florence, in The Earthly
Republic, ed. B. G. Kohl and R. G. Witt (Philadelphia, 1978), p. 136).
3
Such is the unity of all history that any one who endeavours to tell a piece of it must feel that his
first sentence tears a seamless web. See F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law
(2nd edn., Cambridge, 1898), p. 1.
4
M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (1956), p. 25.
2

2010 The Author. History 2010 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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HOW HISTORIANS BEGIN

hardly consider the issue at all, while historiographers do not regard

memorability or the part-to-whole relation as important. This article
emerges from the tension between these two observations. In general it
aims to contribute to the debate started by Hayden White in his formalist
analysis of histories purely as formal verbal structures: how far do
historical and fictional discourses overlap, resemble or correspond with
each other?5 But it does this by considering fragments of historical texts,
not the form and mode of whole works of history. The article is divided
into two halves: the first investigates the fictional qualities of historians
beginnings and, the second their rhetorical structures.
I
In works of historiography, even of the most practical kind, there is very
little reflection on how to begin writing. In the chapter on writing in
Geoffrey Eltons The Practice of History: nothing.6 In a book promisingly entitled Writing History: Theory and Practice, published in 2003:
nothing.7 Not even Alan Munslows recent Narrative and History, which
aims to explain how historians make and, specifically, write history, has
anything to say on beginning.8 This general disregard for the craft of
opening is well expressed in some of the contributions to a volume
published in 1970 and entitled The Historians Workshop, in which a
group of historians were invited to reflect, in autobiographical mode, on
the progress of one of their books from first idea to publication and
reception. J. G. A. Pocock described his preparation for writing (books,
notes, paper, pen, ink), then said: I must cast about once or twice for a
suitable rhetorical exordium, and then the patterns begin to develop as
the sentences and paragraphs take shape.9 And L. P. Curtis remarked:
No sooner had I found the right beginning and abandoned most of my
original outline, than the words began to tumble out in profusion as
though a small dam had given way.10 Both authors essentially say that
the opening is a mere piece of lubrication, insignificant in itself. This is
very much a stereotype of literary production the opening as the
magical formula, to unlock or unblock, sweeping aside previous plans.
For the actuality of this formula, we can look to Gnter Grasss account
of the genesis of his novel The Tin Drum: he spent weeks at his desk
looking for the words to make a sentence that would open doors, a
5

H. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore, MD,

1973), pp. 34.
6
G. R. Elton, The Practice of History (2nd edn., Oxford, 2002).
7
Writing History: Theory and Practice, ed. S. Berger, H. Feldner and K. Passmore (2003).
8
A. Munslow, Narrative and History (Basingstoke, 2007) [hereafter Munslow, Narrative and
History], p. 1.
9
J. G. A. Pocock, Working on Ideas in Time, in The Historians Workshop: Original Essays by
Sixteen Historians, ed. L. P. Curtis (New York, 1970), p. 162. I thank Professor John Tosh for this
reference.
10
L. P. Curtis, Of Images and Imagination in History, ibid., p. 267.
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TREVOR DEAN 401

sentence terse enough to blow up the dam and let the words flow.11
Historians and novelists might thus agree: some texts allow themselves to
be written only when the author finds the key.
Compare historiography with literary production and literary scholarship. Creative writing courses give explicit advice and exercises on how
to write openings: they categorize openings, and teach ways to give the
audience reasons for reading on, or to make the reader ask questions.12
In literary analysis, the primary French narratologist, Grard Genette,
writes in his Narrative Discourse of the unavoidable difficulty of beginning, the difficulty residing in the tension to be resolved between the
starting point and temporal sequencing of the textual narrative and the
starting point and sequencing of the story being told.13 Genette outlined
two kinds of literary opening in medias res and the retrograde movement of narrative embeddings and Antony Nuttall fashioned his book
Openings out of applying that scheme to openings from canonical works
of European literature.14 French scholars have studied the openings of
Flaubert, Balzac, Zola and Dumas, raising issues such as the use and
manipulation of commonplaces and stereotypes, the creation of the hors
texte (points of reference in the readers world) and the representation of
textual space.15
Books naturally divide into two parts: Part One: the beginning of the
book; and Part Two: the rest of the book.16 For literary scholars
the opening thus functions as frontier, distinguishing an inside and an
outside, a threshold for the text, and a threshold for the reader (between
the space in which the reader lives and the space encountered in the novel:
first sentences should be long in order to tear the reader out of his
everyday life, says J. L. Borges).17 Edward Said summed up this attitude
in his own work, Beginnings: Every writer knows that the choice of a
beginning . . . is crucial, not only because it determines much of what
follows, but because a works beginning is . . . the main entrance to what

11

G. Grass, Peeling the Onion (2007), pp. 41922. For this and other metaphors: Z. Leader, Writers
Block (Baltimore, 1991), pp. 810; C. Romagnolo, Narrative Beginnings in Amy Tans The Joy Luck
Club: A Feminist Study, Studies in the Novel, xxxv (2003), 89.
12
J. Singleton, The Creative Writing Workbook (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 240; J. Hyem, Opening
Scenes, in Taking Reality by Surprise: Writing for Pleasure and Publication, ed. S. Sellers (1991), pp.
723.
13
G. Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, 1980), p. 46.
14
Ibid., pp. 3546, 54, 627; A. D. Nuttall, Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel
(Oxford, 1992).
15
C. Duchet, Pour une socio-critique ou variations sur un incipit, Littrature, i (1971); idem,
Lidologie de la mise en texte, La pense, ccxv (1980); G. Lascault, Commencements de Dumas,
LArc, lxxi (1977) [hereafter Lascault, Commencements de Dumas]; J. Verrier, Les dbuts de romans
(Paris, 1988).
16
M. Goulish, 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance (2001) [hereafter Goulish, 39 Microlectures], p. 59. I thank Professor Joe Kelleher for this reference. The observation is Aristotelian: P.
Arrington and S. K. Rose, Prologues to What is Possible: Introductions and Metadiscourse,
College Composition and Communication, xxxviii (1987), 306.
17
Lascault, Commencements de Dumas, p. 6; Borges quoted in Goulish, 39 Microlectures, p. 62.
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HOW HISTORIANS BEGIN

it offers.18 Literary openings are determinant because they have memorability: the first word of a text remains longest with the reader.19 They
establish time, place and narrative voice. They set up a counterpoint
with the rest of the work, sketching outlines by which readers comprehend the whole: openings becoming expressive of the whole work.20
Openings set the rules of the game to be played by the reader, guiding
responses. The study of literary beginnings thus relates to three strands in
literary scholarship: the ways in which texts are constructed (temporality,
sequencing, emplacement, narrative voice), the ways in which they relate
to the non-textual world (the hors texte, the threshold), and the ways in
which readers respond to them (inducing continued reading, inducing a
type of reading, announcing themes memorably).
In historical scholarship, by contrast, openings are not generally
recognized as a problem. Three exceptions are noteworthy. Michael Stanfords Companion to the Study of History explicitly addresses the issue of
openings, in the course of a discussion of the differences between fictional
and historical narrative: the opening words of a novel, he argues, not
only start the action, they show the reader where to stand in order to view
it; but the historian, he continues, has only one place to stand (his own)
and only one attitude (that of impartial observer) and does not presume to
dictate the readers response.21 This is a contentious, perhaps naive,
argument, and discounts the extent to which in history as in fiction the
narrators position is not individual but seeks to enter into minds that are
unlike our own.22 However, Stanfords position echoes a range of scholarly opinion regarding the focalizing options available to the historian.23
The second exception is J. H. Hexter, who at one time moved in the
direction of micro-analysis or the examination of any fragment of
historical rhetoric without primary regard to and out of relation to the
historiographic whole of which it is a part,24 and later raised the question:
Where should I begin the story? Hexter did not consider this to be a
problem: though the choice would seem to lie, he wrote, between infinite
regress along the continuous causal chain, and random choice of starting point, in fact starting points are easily found.25 More recently, a study
18

E. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (2nd edn., 1985), p. 3.

V. Brombert, Opening Signals in Narrative, New Literary History, xi (1980), 495; similarly S. G.
Kellman, Grand Openings and Plain: The Poetics of First Lines, Sub-Stance, xvii (1977) [hereafter
Kellman, Grand Openings and Plain], 140.
20
Kellman, Grand Openings and Plain, 144. Key examples are Shakespearean: M. J. B. Allen,
Toys, Prologues and the Great Amiss: Shakespeares Tragic Openings, in Shakespearean Tragedy,
ed. D. Palmer and M. Bradbury (1984).
21
M. Stanford, A Companion to the Study of History (Oxford, 1994), pp. 8792.
22
Herbert Butterfield, quoted in E. Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel
(Princeton, NJ, 1983), p. 67.
23
Munslow, Narrative and History, pp. 489; D. Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore, 1999),
pp. 11920; K. Pihlainen, The Moral of the Historical Story: Textual Differences in Fact and
Fiction, New Literary History, xxxiii (2002), 534.
24
J. H. Hexter, The Rhetoric of History, in his Doing History (1968), pp. 467.
25
J. H. Hexter, The History Primer (1972), pp. 21819.
19

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TREVOR DEAN 403

of quotations in historians opening paragraphs has examined in detail

the practice by which a plurality of voices is woven into a complex
dialogic pattern.26 In so far as historiographical scholarship has
addressed the problem of opening, it has either made general statements
without systematic analysis or brushed the issue aside or examined only
one aspect of historians practice.
There is one further question to be addressed at the outset: is the
category of opening line an obvious one in works of history? Journal
articles present no difficulty, except for the growing practice of inserting
an abstract between the title and the first sentence. In books, however,
before the first line of Chapter One, come the title page, the contents
page, the acknowledgements, and the preface (collectively, the paratext).
From the readers point of view, the first line of Chapter One is often
not the point of entry into reading the book: before that s/he will have
perused the blurb on the book-jacket, looked up some items in the
index, opened the book at random and read the odd sentence or paragraph. So at the point of reception first lines are not actually first lines.
To complicate matters further, there is sometimes authorial dialogue
between paratext and first line.27 These three issues the paratext, the
readers reading sequence, dialogue between paratext and first line
might seem to vitiate any focus on the opening line of Chapter One.
Nevertheless, that opening line does remain marked off as separate and
significant: page numbering changes from roman to arabic, thus placing
the preface, prologue, or foreword outside the content of the book.28
Also, from the first line of Chapter One, the register changes: in the
paratext, the historian is speaking personally, as an author; from
chapter one, s/he is speaking as a historian. According to Roland
Barthes, this draws attention to a different time frame, the complex,
non-linear time of the discourse itself.29 Some late twentieth-century historical practice has sought to elide the difference between these registers
or voices, constructing a more subjective authorial voice,30 but it has to
be said that this mode has not had great impact on the body of historical writing.
How far does the argument of Hexter, Genette and Nuttall that the
only analytical choice is between in medias res and infinite regression
apply to the writing of history? On the one hand, it could be argued that

26
M. Silver and M. Bondi, Weaving Voices: A Study of Article Openings in Historical Discourse,
Linguistic Insights, xv (2004) [hereafter Silver and Bondi, Weaving Voices], 156.
27
Aficionados of Paul Scott and of television drama will instantly recognise the allusion in my title
(A. E. Curry, Lancastrian Normandy: The Jewel in the Crown, in England and Normandy in the
Middle Ages, ed. D. Bates and A. Curry (1994), p. 235).
28
V. K. Bhatia, Genre Mixing in Academic Introductions, English for Specific Purposes, xvi (1997),
185.
29
R. Barthes, Le discours de lhistoire, in Le bruissment de la langue (Paris, 1984) [hereafter
Barthes, Le discours de lhistoire], pp. 1567.
30
P. Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier
(Baltimore, 1992), pp. 8491.

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HOW HISTORIANS BEGIN

everything in history is in medias res, in that every event is part of a

process, and, on the other hand, that, as Burckhardt argued, it is impossible to start at the beginning, either because there is no single beginning
or because the beginning is out of sight. In order to examine recent and
contemporary historical practice, I have used both an inductive and a
deductive method in order to draw distinctions from and similarities to
fiction: first, by examining a corpus of examples; second, by using categories established in discourse analysis.
To establish a corpus, I took the opening words of 100 recent monographs, selected at random. These display just six basic tropes at the level
of content:
1. An initial event, marking an important transition: a birth, a death, a
coronation, an election, a marriage, a moment of arrival, an act of
artistic commissioning, a new policy, the overthrow of a government,
the opening or closing of an era, and (cleverly) a historian beginning
to write.31
2. An achievement, changing the condition of the object of study: the
building of an empire, the conquest of a country.32
3. A perception or a state of affairs, either in the past (and therefore
implicitly contrasted to the actuality) or in the present.33
4. A rationale: stating the scale of the object of study and/or the scope
and purpose of the study itself. The former usually takes the form of
a superlative assertion of size, asserting an individual or event to be
the strangest and most troubling, the most powerful and influential,
the most brilliant, or the most decisive,34 but it is sometimes defensively parodied by stressing an apparent lack of size or significance:
poor relations or unlikely and . . . unprofitable objects of investiga-

31

D. Loades, Elizabeth I (2003), p. 1; J. M. Walker, The Elizabethan Icon: 16032003 (Basingstoke,

2003), p. 1; G. J. White, Restoration and Reform 11531165: Recovery from Civil War in England
(Cambridge, 2000), p. 1; D. Romano, The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Francesco Foscari 13731457
(New Haven, CN, 2007), p. 1; R. M. Warnicke, The Marrying of Anne of Cleves: Royal Protocol in
Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2000), p. 1; L. L. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony,
Portrait and Print, 16451661 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 1; C. P. Murphy, The Popes Daughter (2004),
p. 3; L. Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-century England
(Cambridge, 2005), p. 1; R. G. Musto, Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New
Age (Berkeley, CA, 2003), p. 1; C. Shaw, Popular Government and Oligarchy in Renaissance Italy
(Leiden, 2006), p. 3; J. Osgood, Caesars Legacy: Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire
(Cambridge, 2006), p. 1.
32
M. Aurell, The Plantagenet Empire 11541224 (2007), p. 1; R. Bartlett, England under the Norman
and Angevin Kings, 10751225 (Oxford, 2000), p. 1.
33
K. Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-century Politics
(Cambridge, 2000), p. 3; S. Alpers, The Vexations of Art: Velazquez and Others (New Haven, CN,
2005), p. 1; M. E. Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (Cambridge, MA, 2007), p. 1.
34
D. Cressy, Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 2000), p. 1; L. L.
Huneycutt, Matilda of Scotland: A Study in Medieval Queenship (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 1; J. Guy,
Thomas More (2000), p. 1; I. Worthington, Philip II of Macedonia (New Haven, 2008), p. 1.
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TREVOR DEAN 405

tion.35 Otherwise, purpose and scope are simply stated: This is a

study of institutional extremism, for example.36
5. Reference to other texts, either by quotation, or by allusion in asserting continuity or discontinuity within historiographical trends or
debates.37
6. Puzzles, mysteries and strange denials: How French people tried to
make sense of their childhood and adolescence in past centuries
remains something of a mystery.38 This book takes up a subject that
has no history.39
A preliminary conclusion would be that none of the above is impossible in fiction: nascent events, perceptions, quotations, mysteries are all
common there. A second perspective is to use the concept of positioning
the frame of reference used to introduce a topic whether in narrative or
exposition and the categories for this established in a work of discourse
analysis on textual openings and closings.40 These categories are: the
synoptic (making a general statement about events or people), the episodic (recounting a particular event . . . specifically located in time and
space), the contextual (making reference to a non-textual starting point),
the discursive (making explicit reference to the activity of narration or
exposition), the situational (beginning abruptly with a concrete scene: in
medias res in its common meaning) and the prescriptive.
Using a broader range of examples, the first preliminary point to
note is that historians certainly can plunge straight into the action (the
situational):
In S. Zeno Cathedral of Pistoia the Washing of the Disciples Feet was just
ending.41
Berliners, gaunt from short rations and stress, had little to celebrate at
Christmas in 1944.42

Some historians start with their own experiences or visions (contextual):

35
S. Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge, 2002), p. 1; P. Denley,
Commune and Studio in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena (Bologna, 2006), p. 1.
36
I. V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany
(Ithaca, 2005), p. 1, is one among many examples.
37
For example, see J. Gooch, Mussolini and his Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign
Policy, 19221940 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 1; R. Mackenney, Renaissances: The Cultures of Italy,
c.1300c.1600 (Basingstoke, 2005), p. 1; S. Sidlavskas, Body, Place and Self in Nineteenth-Century
Painting (Cambridge, 2000), p. 1.
38
C. Heywood, Growing up in France: From the Ancien Regime to the Third Republic (Cambridge,
2007), p. 1.
39
B. C. Hett, Death in the Tiergarten: Murder and Criminal Justice in the Kaisers Berlin (Cambridge,
MA, 2004), p. 1.
40
L. Tolchinsky, V. Johannson and A. Zamora, Text Openings and Closings in Writing and
Speech: Autonomy and Differentiation, Written Language and Literacy, v (2002).
41
D. Weinstein, The Captains Concubine: Love, Honour and Violence in Renaissance Tuscany
(Baltimore, 2000), p. 3.
42
A. Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002), p. 1.

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HOW HISTORIANS BEGIN

In the early 1950s, when I was living in Paris, I happened to see a short film
a court mtrage I cannot recall the name of its maker, but the film itself
has remained very vividly in my mind.43
Jai longtemps rv dcrire lhistoire dune petite ville, Romans par
exemple en Dauphin; cit que je hante avec plaisir; province dont jaime
les habitants et les paysages.44

Others make general statements, sometimes epigrammatic in tone, about

events or people (synoptic):
Inside every historian there lies concealed a biographer struggling to get
out.45
European pastoralists are always other people.46

Some prefer the episodic:

In September 1934, some 22 months after coming to power in Germany,
Hitler gave an important address to the NS-Frauenschaft, the main political organization for Nazi women in Nuremburg.47
On an evening at the beginning of March in the year 1484, the podest of
Piacenza witnessed a strange and alarming scene in the streets of the city.48

Finally, the more reflexive might begin by making explicit reference to the
activity of narration or exposition (the discursive),
Nella storia come nella narrativa, il primo problema sempre quello di
scegliere il punto di partenza: cominiciare dal principio.49
Florence might be thought, of all cities, not to need an introduction, for its
legend always precedes it: the birthplace of the Renaissance and the
cradle of western civilization.50

Historians can thus reveal their own memories and desires, comment
on other historians, assert the special nature of their objects of inquiry,
tell us (in external focalization) what historical actors saw or experienced,
and justify the content and method of their texts. Personal experience,
43

R. Cobb, Reactions to the French Revolution (Oxford, 1972), p. 1.

I have long dreamed of writing a history of a small town, Romans for example in the Dauphn;
a city that I visit with pleasure; a province whose inhabitants and countryside I adore (E. Le Roy
Ladurie, Le carnaval de Romans (1979), p. 9).
45
A. J. P. Taylor, From Napoleon to the Second International: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Europe,
ed. C. Wrigley (1993), p. 24 (first published in Wiener Beitrge zur Geschichte der Neuzeit, 1979).
46
C. Wickham, Pastoralism and Underdevelopment in the Early Middle Ages, Settimane di Studio
(Spoleto), xxxi (1983), 401.
47
M. Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich (2003), p. 1.
48
D. M. Bueno de Mesquita, Ludovico Sforza and his Vassals, in Italian Renaissance Studies, ed.
E. F. Jacob (1960), p. 184.
49
In history as in fiction, the first problem is always that of choosing the point of departure: to start
from the beginning (P. J. Jones, La storia economica. Dalla caduta dellimpero romano al secolo
XIV, in Einaudi, Storia dItalia, ii.1 (Turin, 1974), p. 1469). Cf. Where and how to begin, that is the
problem for a speaker or writer (R. Syme, Human Rights and Social Status at Rome, Classical
Outlook, lxii (19867), 37).
50
J. M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 12001575 (Oxford, 2006), p. 1.
44

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TREVOR DEAN 407

maxims, specific events, reflexivity as narrator: all of these could easily be

paralleled from fiction. Two key differences between fictional and historical narration would seem to remain: the absence of the narrator as a
character in the story, and the absence of internal focalization (seeing
from within another characters point-of-view). Though it has been suggested that the historical author may be herself considered a character,51
the pressure within the profession and its outlets in academic journals
and publishing houses would seem to confine the historian to an omniscient viewing-point. Synoptic, contextual and discursive openings
adhere to that rule. In so far as they explore intention and attitude,
historians can approach a characters frame of perception, and they do
attempt to mind-read, changing their viewing point and speaking voice
through the insertion of quotations. However, this change of viewing
point is inhibited by historians need for certainty, and fear of uncertainty: no historian would begin, All this happened, more or less.52
With their specificities of date, place and names, with their mixture of
evaluative, differentiating and totalising vocabulary (always, every,
Berliners), openings adhere to this second rule.
The differences from fiction are underlined by two elements of content:
referentiality and historiography. Quotations and footnotes, precise
dates and places refer us to events that really happened. The declarations
of importance and the references to other scholars by name or inference
place the new work in the context of the historiography. Some historians
stress one of these elements at the expense of the others. Accentuated
referentiality produces the archival opening:
The box D4 UI 7, in the fonds of the justices de paix of Paris, kept in the
Archives de la Seine, entitled Basse-Gele de la Seine, procs-verbaux de
mort violente (ans III-IX), lists the particulars of 404 persons (there are in
fact 405 procs-verbaux, but one man is listed twice) who met violent
deaths through suicide, accidents, murder and natural causes.53

This has a very factual appearance the shelfmark, the precise

numbers and it conjures up a picture of the archive, the physicality of
historical evidence, the historian gathering data. In starting a work of
history, the archival opening represents the start of the historians work
or, at least, the implied start.
Recent examples of the historiographical opening, such as
Vengeance has been a hot topic of debate among classical scholars for
several years now.54
51
C. W. Bynum, In Praise of Fragments: History in the Comic Mode, in his Fragmentation and
Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), p. 25.
52
K. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York, 1991; first published 1969), p. 1.
53
R. Cobb, Death in Paris (Oxford, 1978), p. 3. For other examples, see C. De la Roncire, Un
changeur florentin du Trecento: Lippo di Fede del Sega (1285 env.1363 env.) (Paris, 1973), p. 11; C.
Ginzburg, Witchcraft and Popular Piety: Notes on a Modenese Trial of 1519, in Ginzburg, Myths,
Emblems, Clues (1990), p. 1.
54
F. McHardy, Vengeance in Classical Greece (2008), p. 1.

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The explosion of interest in the history of women and gender, triggered in

the 1960s, has produced theories about how womens status and opportunities have been determined in recent centuries.55

show how they situate the text in a contextual academic story a debate,
an explosion, products and provide justifications for writing, and for
reading.
Referentiality and historiography pull historical openings away from
fiction, but two other elements draw them back again: readability and
temporal construction. Suspenseful devices, such as arresting quotations,
engagingly excessive claims, the hint of danger or threat, give the text a
readable quality. When accentuated, as has become common, readability
offers us characters or places, devoid of reference to documents, historiography or even dates:
The final years of the fourteenth century were hard ones for Margarida
Gramone.56
His name was Domenico Scandella, but he was called Menocchio.57
On the last night of her life, Vittoria Savelli wore an old shift.58
A stage, in a fifteenth-century Italian square.59
Montaillou is not a large parish.60

These openings escape entirely the categories of positioning. They call

attention to their thin referentiality. They are almost fictional in their
absence of reference to context or discourse: they resist lamination (to
use a metaphor of Michel de Certeaus) by the archive, by quotations,
references and notes.61 These openings focus rather on place and character, in much the same way as the first lines of many novels. Sometimes
they have just three essential elements: they name the main actor, they
place her in time, and they describe her experience in much the same
way as the novels of, for example, Graham Greene often commence
with a name, a place and a perception. Four of these examples omit
a date: Sans sa date, un vnement nest pas mme historique.62
Others recall numerous novels that open with an act of naming ( Call
me Ishmael. ; Everyone called him Pop Eye; The boys name was

55

J. Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (2001), p. 1.

S. McDonough, Impoverished Mothers and Poor Widows: Negotiating Images of Poverty in
Marseilles Court, Journal of Medieval History, xxxiv (2008), 64.
57
C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
(Harmondsworth, 1992).
58
T. V. Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 2004), p. 17.
59
A. Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Renaissance (2001), p. 3.
60
E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 12941324 (1978), p. 3.
In the original version in French, this is the second sentence of chapter 1, which follows a thirteenpage Avant-propos: Montaillou, village Occitan de 1294 1324 (Paris, 1975).
61
M. de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York, 1988), p. 94.
62
B. Lacroix, Lhistorien au Moyen Age (Montreal and Paris, 1971), p. 85.
56

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TREVOR DEAN 409

Santiago).63 The third example here a woman in her shift suspensefully reduces the frame to a character and her clothing, while constructing time by reference to her lifespan, not to external dating. This
reduction of space is found also in the last two examples, the first of
which avoids any possibility of action by omitting a main verb. As
Ankersmit has pointed out (using Barthesian terms), such microhistorical works are all notation (trivial detail) and no predictive (meaning/
story), and effectively contemporise the past.64 Such reduction in scale
owes much to microhistorys rhetoric of smallness as counterpoint to
the common rhetoric of magnitude found in proems.65 Against the topos
of stressing the magnitude of the object of research, microhistory has
spread the practice of belittling the object.
The other element of fictionality in historical openings lies in their
construction of time. In his essay on historical discourse, Barthes briefly
touches on beginnings, which he characterizes as destructive, because
they are places where the start of the matire nonc joins the start of the
nonciation.66 Barthes was drawing these conclusions mainly from classics of historical literature (Herodotus, Joinville, Michelet, Machiavelli),
but they apply equally to contemporary historical practice. In particular,
the junction, at the beginning of a text, of two different times, that of the
material and that of its presentation, is markedly present in a good
number of openings, which often have double, sometimes triple, temporal points of reference.67
In 1797 Immanuel Kant, a frail 73-year-old bachelor soon to enter
the physical and mental helplessness of his final years, published The
Metaphysics of Morals, the last of the great building blocks of a massive
philosophical edifice.68
In a book replete with useful instructions for those about to sail to India,
written by Thomas Williamson, who had served in the Bengal army for
twenty-five years, appears a plate depicting the Marquis Wellesley and his
suite at the breakfast table of the nawab of Awadh.69

In the first example, the time of things (to use de Certeaus formulation)
is 1797 (the year of publication), but the discursive time takes us into
Kants final years and to his reputation, living and posthumous. The
second case is rather more complex. The matire nonc is actually the
63
The opening lines of: H. Melville, Moby Dick; L. Jones, Mister Pip; and P. Coelho, The Alchemist,
trans. A. R. Clarke.
64
F. R. Ankersmit, The Reality Effect in the Writing of History: The Dynamics of Historiographical Topology, Medelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, lii (1989), 32.
65
Aristotle, On Rhetoric, trans. G. A. Kennedy (Oxford, 2007), p. 234 (1415b).
66
Barthes, Le discours de lhistoire, pp. 1556.
67
P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (2 vols., Chicago, 1984) [hereafter Ricoeur, Time and Narrative],
i. 146.
68
A. J. La Vopa, Thinking about Marriage: Kants Liberalism and the Preacher Morality of
Conjugal Union, Journal of Modern History, lxxvii (2005), 1.
69
S. Sivasundaram, Trading Knowledge: The East India Companys Elephants in India and
Britain, Historical Journal, xlviii (2005), 27.

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HOW HISTORIANS BEGIN

plate in the volume, the picture (which the reader sees on turning the
page) showing figures at breakfast against a background of elephants in
combat. This advice book itself is presented as looking forward in time
(for those about to sail to India) while the historian also looks backwards into the career of the author (twenty-five years in the Bengal
army). In this case, temporally prospective and retrospective views
are embedded within a construction in present time. The historiannarrators knowledge is thus, like the omniscient fiction-writers, panchronic, encompassing in retrospect the narrative agents entire life
stories.70
History resembles fiction in three respects: in medias res is an initial
possibility; readability and temporal construction place the historian in
the same positions as the novelist in relation to readers and to narrated
material. On the other hand, historical texts with their limited range of
focalization, and their non-character narrator, deny themselves the full
range of narratological possibilities: the more common starting points lie
in historiography, in situated episodes, and in general statements about
historical agents or the writing of history.
II
If historical beginnings share some features with fiction, they also have
rhetorical functions. A branch of applied linguistics has been animated
for some years by John Swaless claim that the typical introduction is a
crafted rhetorical artifact and by his analysis of that craft.71 Swales
divides the introduction of research articles into a number of rhetorical
moves four in his 1981 formulation, three in his 1990 revision of the
model each in turn subdivided into a variable number of optional
steps. Naming the model as CARS (Create a Research Space), Swales
presents it as first establishing the territory (showing the centrality
of the topic, outlining current knowledge, reviewing previous research),
then establishing a niche (typically by indicating a gap or questioning
the validity of existing interpretations) and finally occupying the niche
(by describing the new project).
Since 1990, numerous scholars have investigated the applicability of
this model in different academic disciplines, mainly in the sciences and
social sciences, arguing for further modification to take account of differences both between and within disciplines, between empirical and
theoretical articles, and between articles in English and those in other
languages.72 Among the variations observed are the absence of one or
70
U. Margolin, Reference, Coreference, Referring and the Dual Structure of the Literary Narrative, Poetics Today, xii (1991), 526. See also P. Hernadi, Clios Cousins: Historiography as Translation, Fiction and Criticism, New Literary History, vii (1976), 250.
71
J. M. Swales, Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (Cambridge, 1990), pp.
13760; p. 157 for the quotation.
72
A. Arvay and G. Tanko, A Contrastive Analysis of English and Hungarian Theoretical Research
Article Introductions, International Review of Applied Linguistics, xlii (2004), 71100; I. Ozturk,

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TREVOR DEAN 411

more moves, the cyclical (rather than linear) sequencing of moves, and
the need for additional elements within moves, such as research questions, or theoretical positions.73 Scholars have also had to find solutions
to the problem of distinguishing between moves, of establishing their
borders, given that one move can be embedded in another or that two
moves can inhabit the same sentence.74 Specialized articles of historical
research have not featured much in these investigations (one scholar
included two historical articles in a small sample),75 so I have constructed
a large sample of 200 article introductions, by taking all the articles from
eleven history journals published in the year 2005.
Certainly, centrality claims are used by historians, and in an initial
position, as in the Swales model:
Politeness has recently become a central concept in the intellectual history
of eighteenth-century Britain.76
Perhaps no area of historical inquiry has been as contentious as that
concerning early Stuart religion and its link to political life.77

Sometimes, a centrality claim is cleverly combined with the indication of

a gap:
To an outsider, what is noteworthy about the long-standing debate over
the decline of the Liberals in Britain is the scant consideration it has given
to parallel cases.78

All told, 37 of the sample of 200 articles used such formulations,

claiming that this or that phenomenon is crucial for historians, dominant
in the historiography, or at the heart of the debate.79 However, a
strange thing happens to centrality in the hands of historians: it is
The Textual Organisation of Research Article Introductions in Applied Linguistics: Variability
within a Single Discipline, English for Specific Purposes, xxvi (2007), 2538.
73
D. Bunton, Generic Moves in PhD Thesis Introductions, in Academic Discourse, ed. J.
Flowerdew (2002).
74
B. Kanoksilapatham, Rhetorical Structure of Biochemistry Research Articles, English for Specific Purposes, xxiv (2005), 270; V. K. Bhatia, Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings
(1993), pp. 859.
75
S. Hunston, Professional Conflict: Disagreement in Academic Discourse, in Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair, ed. M. Baker, G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli (Philadelphia and
Amsterdam, 1993). R. Holmes used ten articles from the American Historical Review in his Genre
Analysis and the Social Sciences: An Investigation of the Structure of Research Article Discussion
Sections in Three Disciplines, English for Specific Purposes, xvi (1997), 32137.
76
M. Peltonen, Politeness and Whiggism, 16881732, Historical Journal, xlviii (2005), 391.
77
C. A. Prior, Ecclesiology and Political Thought in England, 1580c. 1630, Historical Journal,
xlviii (2005), 855.
78
M. Fairburn and S. Haslett, Voter Behaviour and the Decline of the Liberals in Britain and New
Zealand, 191129: Some Comparisons, Social History, xxx (2005), 195.
79
M. Fllmer, The Problem of National Solidarity in Interwar Germany , German History, xxiii
(2005), 202; W. M. Ormrod, The Royal Nursery: A Household for the Younger Children of Edward
III, English Historical Review, cxx (2005), 398; P. Nightingale, Some New Evidence of Crises and
Trends of Mortality in Late Medieval England, Past & Present, clxxxvii (2005), 33; J. Mark,
Society, Resistance and Revolution: The Budapest Middle Class and the Hungarian Communist
State, 194856, English Historical Review, cxx (2005), 963.
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HOW HISTORIANS BEGIN

transferred from the historiographical context (this is central because

historians continue to debate it) to the historical period under consideration (this was perceived or experienced as central by contemporaries).
Centrality is projected from the historians activity to that of the historical actors. Thus, Palmerston saw it [the religious question] as one of his
central tasks,80 the films of Marcel Pagnol were some of the most
popular in the history of the French cinema . . . and hotly contested
pieces of ideological capital,81 pass-books defined the essence of life in
Apartheid South Africa,82 and nationalism was a key force in shaping
the political and social landscape of Europe.83
Equally common among historical openings, however, is what Swales
calls a topic generalization, that is, a statement about the current state of
knowledge in the relevant area. Thirty-eight articles in the sample used
this as an initial move:
Scholars of later medieval languages and their literatures have often
argued for a dawn, rise and subsequent triumph of the vernacular in
western Europe.84
It is common knowledge that the majority of accused witches during the
witch-craze of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were female.85

And finally, the other (later) moves and steps in the Swales model also
feature occasionally as opening statements in historical articles. A few
authors go straight for the gap: Historians of English witchcraft have not
been particularly interested in male witches.86 Rather more state their
purpose in writing: this article attempts to catalogue, analyse and
assess . . .,87 and so on.
The CARS model helps construct a typology of the openings of historical research articles. However, adjustments have to be made: centrality claims are not the most common opening move, and they are distorted
by historians focus on temporality. Moreover, the model accounts for
under half of the opening sentences in the sample (92 out of 200).

80

J. Wolffe, Lord Palmerston and Religion: A Reappraisal, English Historical Review, cxx (2005),
907.
81
P. Bowles, Politicizing Pagnol: Rural France, Film and Ideology under the Popular Front,
French History, xix (2005), 112.
82
K. Breckenridge, Verwoerds Bureau of Proof: Total Information in the Making of Apartheid,
History Workshop Journal, lix (2005) [hereafter Breckenridge, Verwoerds Bureau of Proof], 83.
83
V. Tolz, Orientalism, Nationalism and Ethnic Diversity in late Imperial Russia, Historical
Journal, xlviii (2005), 127.
84
M. Vale, Language, Politics and Society: The Uses of the Vernacular in the Later Middle Ages,
English Historical Review, cxx (2005), 15.
85
K. Jones and M. Zell, The divels speciall instruments: Women and Witchcraft before the
Great Witch-hunt , Social History, xxx (2005), 45.
86
E. J. Kent, Masculinity and Male Witches in Old and New England, 15931680, History
Workshop Journal, lx (2005), 69.
87
C. J. Bearman, An Examination of Suffragette Violence, English Historical Review, cxx (2005),
365; D. A. Gordon, The Backdoor of the Nation State: Expulsions of Foreigners and Continuity in
Twentieth-century France, Past & Present, clxxxvi (2005), 201.
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TREVOR DEAN 413

Rather more important numerically (98 instances) are three other

forms of opening, absent from the CARS model. These are the use of
quotations (25 instances), narrative fragments or episodes (30) and exposition (43). Quotations can serve many functions: distancing author from
content, displaying erudition, enhancing credibility, and so on.88 Use of a
quotation can suggest a writer who is trying to hide traces of her own
presence, and can typify an event, intensify a representation, or
express a position.89 None of these functions is contained within the
CARS model.
As regards narrative fragments and expositions, some definition is
needed. I define exposition as the description of a situation, institution,
territory, a publication or long-term development, which takes on the
subject position in the sentence and erases individual agency: what Paul
Ricoeur has termed realist historiography.90 The sample thus contains
undifferentiated human groups (Irish women, composers in central
Germany, English men and women), institutions (monarchical power,
the German army), territories (France, the German lands, Latin
America), publications (Zolas novels, books, a report), and abstract
nouns (the debate about abortion law, the economy, the coming of the
railroad). Long-term developments include experiences, such as the
transformation of middle class life; continuous behaviour, such as political engagement; and evolutions, such as modernization or economic
growth. In terms of narratological criteria for selecting events, expositions constitute a group of processes or transitions.91 Narrative fragments, on the other hand, are constructed at the level of individuals and
small groups, what Ricoeur terms nominalist historiography.92 In narratological terms, they encapsulate choices and confrontations.93 Thus,
individuals stood . . . on trial,94 appeared . . . to give testimony,95 or
made the greatest criminal arrest of his career.96 Other individuals
received a letter,97 or made a surprising admission.98 Narrowly defined

88
W. Teubert, Evaluation and its Discontents, in Strategies in Academic Discourse, ed. E. TogniniBonelli and G. Del Lungo Camiciotti (Amsterdam, 2005), pp. 1978.
89
Silver and Bondi, Weaving Voices, pp. 147, 152.
90
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, ii. 153.
91
M. Bal, Narratology (2nd edn., Toronto, 1999) [hereafter Bal, Narratology], pp. 1823.
92
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, ii. 153.
93
Bal, Narratology, pp. 1846.
94
C. Patterson, Quo Warranto and Borough Corporations in Early Stuart England: Royal Prerogative and Local Privileges in the Central Courts, English Historical Review, cxx (2005), 879.
95
L. Wertheimer, Illegitimate Birth and the English Clergy, 11981348, Journal Medieval History,
xxxi (2005), 211.
96
J. F. Harrington, Tortured Truths: The Self-Expositions of a Juvenile Career Criminal in Early
Modern Nuremberg, German History, xxiii (2005) [hereafter Harrington, Tortured Truths], 143.
97
J. Conlin, Wilkes, the Chevalier dEon and the dregs of liberty: An Anglo-French Perspective
on Ministerial Despotism, 17621771, English Historical Review, cxx (2005), 1251.
98
M. Herder, Substitute or Subordinate? The Role of a Male Procurator at a Benedictine Womens
Monastery, Journal Medieval History, xxxi (2005) [hereafter Herder, Substitute or Subordinate?],
231.

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HOW HISTORIANS BEGIN

groups of people are said to have descended upon Berlin,99 devastated

the district,100 constructed a new . . . shooting range,101 and arrived at
the tomb.102 This group of episodes is more clearly constructed as narratives, but narrative is not absent from the expositions, and is implied by
the long-term changes that are referred to. The difference is one of levels
not alternatives,103 and of nominalization (individuals as against generic
classes of participants).104
In order to analyse this group of openings the narrative and the
expository notions from de Certeau are helpful. Writing of the role of
quotation in historical texts, de Certeau argued that quotation was an
instance of the general rule that requires for the production of realistic
illusion the multiplication of proper names, descriptions and deictics.
This multiplication he also saw as performative, as one of the aspects of
display in historical writing.105 Yet in openings, the display imperative is
often in tension with the narrative voice of the author, as will become
apparent. The following examples illustrate the combination of names,
deictics and narrative:
You will be shot in five minutes . . . ran the headline in the Sddeutsche
Zeitung on 24 June 1954 in an article on the trial of former Wehrmacht
Generalleutnant Theodor Tolsdorff in the town of Traunstein in southern
Bavaria.106
On Wednesday 4 April 1604, an unnamed bailiff in the tiny village of
Zandt, 25 miles south west of Nuremberg, made the greatest criminal
arrest of his career.107
On 10 March 1952 A. J. Turton, the Senior Urban Areas Commissioner of
the Department of Native Affairs (NAD), received a very urgent telegram
from Werner Epstein, the Departmental Secretary, instructing him to take
the next train to Cape Town.108

In this kind of dense referential grounding,109 authors make one of

three solutions to the problem of balancing narrative, names and deictics.
99

J. V. Evans, The Moral State: Men, Mining and Masculinity in the Early GDR, German History,
xxiii (2005), 355.
100
M. Siochr, The Duke of Lorraine and the International Struggle for Ireland, 16491653,
Historical Journal, xlviii (2005), 905.
101
D. Imhoof, Sharpshooting in Gttingen: A Case Study of Cultural Integration in Weimar and
Nazi Germany, German History, xxiii (2005), 460.
102
M. Thomas, Economic Conditions and the Limits to Mobilization in the French Empire,
19361939, Historical Journal, xlviii (2005), 471.
103
P. Ricoeur, La mmoire, lhistoire, loubli (Paris, 2000), p. 307.
104
S. Eggins, P. Wignell and J. R. Martin, The Discourse of History: Distancing the Irrecoverable
Past, in Register Analysis: Theory and Practice, ed. M. Ghadessy (1993), esp. pp. 801.
105
M. de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York, 1988), pp. 945, 99100.
106
A. Searle, The Tolsdorff Trials in Traunstein: Public and Judicial Attitudes to the Wehrmacht in
the Federal Republic, 195460, German History, xxiii (2005), 50.
107
Harrington, Tortured Truths, p. 143.
108
Breckenridge, Verwoerds Bureau of Proof, p. 83.
109
B. Harshaw, Fictionality and Fields of Reference, Poetics Today, v (1984) [hereafter Harshaw,
Fictionality and Fields of Reference], 2445.
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TREVOR DEAN 415

In the first case, the threat of fatal action is followed by numerous deictics
(date, place of headline, name and location of town) and the name and
status of the convict. The second example reverses the order, in a periodic
sentence in which the deictics precede the action. The third example is
more complex, with the action (urgent telegram: take next train) cut up
and placed after specification of date, names and status. These openings
also tend to be broken stylistically into two, as authors perhaps try to
offset the conventional forms for names, dates and titles with a livelier
style to express action. Some historians bridle the deictic impulse, withholding rather than supplying information:
In January 1699 a spasm of anxiety jolted the judges of the Parlement of
Besanon.110
In 1356 Elisende dAlquer, abbess of the monastery of Sant Daniel, made
a surprising admission.111

This sort of opening, now quite common in both articles and books,
would seem to have benefited from more careful reflection on the use of
narrative in historical discourse. It floats some temporal or spatial
coordinates;112 it draws the reader on, often by the use of a single word
(anxiety, surprising) that requires explanation; it focuses on the trivial
or unexpected.113 This sort of opening was not practised fifty or so years
ago: article incipits from English Historical Review and Past and Present
for 1955 fit much more neatly and fully into the Swales model, claiming
centrality, indicating a gap, reviewing previous research, making a topic
generalization.114 Absent in 1955 are superlatives and diminutives regarding magnitude, and specificity as to time: dates are indicated by years or
centuries, but never by any smaller unit of time. The rhetoric of openings
did not then encompass the small-scale or the individual event, and did
not reach for comparative measures of significance. If historical openings
can be divided generally between the phenomenic and the epistemic,
that is focusing either on the specific (event, individual, idea) or on a
significant intellectual debate,115 then the second half of the twentieth
century saw the rise of the phenomenon and the decline of the episteme.
Another victory for microhistory.
The CARS model has some applicability for historical works: establishing a territory and a niche, and occupying that niche are certainly
major elements in the historians repertoire of incipits. But ultimately
the model breaks down: historians often want to start in different ways,
110

D. Lee, Judicial Politics, War Finance and Absolutism: The Parlement of Besanon and the
Venality of Office, 16991705, French History, xix (2005), 440.
111
Herder, Substitute or Subordinate?, p. 231.
112
Harshaw, Fictionality and Fields of Reference, p. 244.
113
Cf. Gossman on Carbin: deliberately raw . . . recounting of a strange incident (L. Gossman,
Anecdote and History, History and Theory, xlii (2003), 1656).
114
One exception turns out to be the third instalment of a longer article: A. P. Thornton, British
Policy in Persia, 18581890, English Historical Review, lxx (1955), 55.
115
Silver and Bondi, Weaving Voices, pp. 145, 147.
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HOW HISTORIANS BEGIN

from different places: from a quotation that discusses a relevant theme,

from an example of individual experience, from a statement about group
behaviour or structural evolution. We have to invent new categories,
related to the tropes and positions examined above, in order to take
account of this. Works of history start differently from those of other
disciplines because of historys attachment, on the one hand, to narrative,
discursiveness and voices from the past, and because of its resistance, on
the other hand, to the social-science model for reporting research findings.
III
Model-breakdown is the fate of analyses from both fiction and applied
linguistics when applied to historical openings. Though in content and
positioning, in readability and temporal construction, history and fiction
share common narrative modes, history marks its difference by referentiality and historiography. Though in centrality and topic generalization
history aligns with the common rhetoric of the social sciences, it diverges
through its use of narrative fragments (yet in those fragments themselves,
the tension is repeated between historical and fictional modes). The
problem of beginning for the historian thus lies in choosing from among
the historiographical, the fictional and the scientific, or attempting to
blend any two of these elements. The results can be alluring or repellent.
Some analyses of fictionality can provide some concluding indications of
why this might be the case. Various theorists of fiction have posited that
fictionality is a contextual assumption made by the reader on the basis
of information provided by the author;116 that fictionality determines the
types of inferencing that the reader may make, licensing the imaginary
extension of the scope of knowledge (for example, through internal
focalization);117 and that the characters of fiction fall into one of three
types: natives (only found in one work of fiction), immigrants (from other
texts or from the real world), and surrogates (versions of real-world
persons).118 Because fictional worlds are incomplete, readers are guided
to read in a particular way, make inferences about characters and situations, recognize them as fictional or real (or surrogate). Historicity too
can be seen as a contextual assumption made by the reader on the basis
of information provided by the author (the paratext, deictics): but here
inferencing is minimized, as focalization is restricted and the type of
characters reduced to just one, immigrants, as all persons in works of
history are migrants from other texts, whether factual or fictional. Historians use the written and visual evidence of both real and imaginary
people to create new texts with claims to factuality. In establishing the
116

R. Walsh, The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction (Columbus, OH,
2007), p. 30.
117
Ibid., p. 34.
118
T. G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA, 1986), p. 29, referring to T. Parsons, Nonexistent
Objects (New Haven, CN, 1980).
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TREVOR DEAN 417

pretended non-fictionality of the historical text, the first sentence plays a

key role in determining the readers assumptions and expectations. Three
moves predominate as means to this end. First, reference is often made to
other works of history, through either quotation or general reference to
historiographical vision, debate or reappraisal. Second, a factual purpose
is declared, either through a statement or through a question. Third,
the opening sentence is often dense with references to actors or objects to
be found in other factual texts or in the real world (dates, places, people,
titles, roles). By these means, historians succeed in concealing the elements of their writing that they share with the writers of fiction: they
conceal them from themselves and they conceal them from their readers.
Hence the absence of reflection on this issue.

2010 The Author. History 2010 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.