History and literary history: Comparative problematics

General historiography and histories of literature were closely linked in approach and overall conceptualization in the nineteenth century. When theories of an independent literary paradigm were formed in the course of the twentieth century, the theory of literary historiography was found problematic and sometimes moribund as a literary approach. As historiography increasingly came to be theorized in literary or rhetorical terms and literature came to be newly historicized, however, the two disciplines are again seen to converge. This article provides, in the light of recent developments on both sides, a survey of the most important and contentious fields of overlap and difference. Structuring the argument on the basis of the subdivision in classical rhetorics, the impossibility of finding a definitive theorization for either history or literary history is admitted, while the heterogeneity of existing forms is interpreted as testimony to the unbroken rhetorical power of historiography as, ultimately, a rhetorical instrument to construct a unified (literary) vision of great persuasive power, although it will no longer be the 'Great Story' or Urtext, but only one version of many possible histories.