"The horizon of this study, which I hope to make less distant in future work, is the relation between narrative in literature and in historiography. The turn toward narrative, particularly in the work of Hayden White, has justifiably been seen as a necessary corrective to the stress in modern historiography upon modes of explanation modeled on the natural and social sciences. Yet the rather sophisticated theories of narrative developed by White and others have, for the most part, not been complemented in historiographical practice by comparably sophisticated mutations of narrative or by challenging combinations of narrative and analysis in a revised understanding of the allowable range of historical accounts. The kinds of narrative employed by historians have tended to remain rather conventional, whether the historians in question have turned from the exclusive preoccupation with social-scientific explanation or continued to tell old stories in spite of calls for more explanatory and intellectually demanding procedures."
- Dominick La Capra, History, Politics, and the Novel, pp. 7-8.
