Historical narrative remains a worthy pursuit for historians seeking a deeper and broader understanding of history. Photo: TUCHONG

Narrative is one of the crucial elements that distinguish history from science as conventionally understood, while also bringing it into close relation with literature. Historians cannot invent ex nihilo in the manner of novelists; they may nonetheless use rhetoric, imagination, textual arrangement, plot, and modes of argumentation to tell a compelling “story.” Historians do not reject narrative. Rather, they use it to extend and deepen the meaning and substance of their works. Even for historians who resist narrative as a form for representing the past, one unavoidable question remains: How can what is known be transformed into what can be narrated? Given the central role of narrative in history—or the narrative quality inherent in historical writing—narrativist theorists of historiography such as Hayden White have argued that history, like literature, belongs to the broader category of narrative.

From the mid-19th century onward, narrative history in the West began to lose ground. Historians became less interested in recounting stories with clear beginnings, developments, and conclusions, and turned instead to questions of evidence in the representation of historical truth. The identification, criticism, and verification of historical sources moved to the forefront, as narrative history gave way to a scientific history oriented toward objectivity, accuracy, and methodological rigor. In the 1950s, cliometrics emerged and quickly became an effective instrument through which historians sought to investigate and grasp the past. Historical materials were reduced to data and mathematical models. Regular patterns in data displaced the unpredictable events that had long animated empirical inquiry, while visual curves, charts, and formulas replaced narration embedded in prose. At the beginning of the 21st century, cliodynamics, a data-driven approach to modeling historical change, went further still, using numerical analysis and simulation to corroborate the past, test hypotheses, and forecast the future. Within this mathematical approach to studying the past and anticipating the future, narrative seemed increasingly marginal.

Yet narrative has never truly departed from history. Almost exactly as cliometrics was gaining prominence in Europe and North America, the British historian Lawrence Stone published “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History” in 1979 in Past & Present, a flagship journal that had once vigorously championed a more scientific approach to historical inquiry. In that essay, Stone offered a penetrating analysis of the return of narrative history. He argued that the revival of narrative was, in essence, a response to dissatisfaction—and even disillusionment—with quantitative methods in historical research and economically determinist models of historical explanation. When historians used quantitative methods to process vast, heterogeneous, and often disorderly bodies of historical evidence, misreadings and omissions were difficult to avoid. At the same time, human culture, individual will, and collective mentalities played a role in historical understanding no less significant than socioeconomic explanations. The latter point was especially important, for it emphasized the deep relationship between human beings—as creatures suspended in webs of meaning of their own making—and culture, symbols, signs, and language. In doing so, it helped propel the cultural turn in historiography. From this point onward, history was no longer understood primarily as a search for laws, but as an interpretation of meaning.

Under these conditions, new historiographical paradigms variously described as microhistory, the history of mentalities, and historical anthropology—and broadly subsumable under the rubric of new cultural history—developed rapidly. These approaches challenged economic history, which had privileged structures, and social history, which had often foregrounded elites, redirecting historical attention toward the lower orders, marginal groups, and fragmented yet urgently connectable “small histories.” All of these developments ultimately converged on the description of individuals and singular events, as exemplified by Carlo Ginzburg’s account of the miller. The narration of individual experience and event-based history is precisely the terrain on which narrative can most fully display its power.

In this sense, the revival of narrative may be understood as a product of the paradigmatic transformation of Western historiography in the 1970s and 1980s. As Stone observed, historians’ return to narrative marked the end of an era: an era that had sought logical, scientific explanations of historical change. Viewed against the context in which Stone wrote “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” this judgment was not only accurate, but also remarkably prescient. Ten years after the publication of Stone’s essay, The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, a leading figure in the field, appeared in 1989. Its publication signaled the increasing maturity of this research paradigm and its emergence as an important school within historical studies. Another decade later, in 1999, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, co-edited by Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, was published, offering a retrospective, synthesis, and prospect of more than two decades of development in new cultural history. In other words, 20 years after Stone proposed the revival of narrative, narrative—and its challenge to scientific and analytical forms of history—still occupied a prominent position in historical inquiry.

In the 21st century, particularly over the past decade or so, new cultural history and the broader cultural turn it generated have gradually receded. Narrative, however, has not entered another cycle of decline alongside new cultural history; it has retained considerable vitality. Two factors are especially important in explaining this persistence. First, after the impact of micro-level research, short-termism, and deconstructive approaches, historians have once again shown a strong interest in large questions concerning structure, regularity, purpose, and meaning in history. The reconstruction of a grand narrative that closely links past, present, and future, and that possesses internal coherence, has become one of the central concerns of historical scholarship. Second, from the perspective of audiences and readers, historians also need to reactivate the mode of storytelling in order to provide the public with a vivid and persuasive sense of historical reality. Such narration draws readers into dialogue with history and into engagement with major contemporary issues that may appear remote from their own lives yet remain inescapable, thereby enabling history to perform its educative and orienting functions. These two factors sustaining the vitality of narrative in historical writing are clearly independent of new cultural history and postmodernism. This suggests that, in an age more in need of certainty than ever before, narrative may still constitute an important means of entering deeply into the past and thereby grasping the future. The aspiration to shape the past into a coherent narrative will therefore not disappear from the historian’s craft.

To be sure, historical narrative must be grounded in evidence and historical sources. Once it exceeds this boundary, it risks entering the perilous realm in which historical truth is lost. Some practitioners of new cultural history, for instance, tend to narrate individual lives at the level of psychology and emotion. Lacking sufficient support from historical materials, such accounts often cross the limits of historical narration and move into the fictional domain of literary creation. At the same time, given the distance between historical periods, even abundant sources and evidence cannot remove the limits that constrain modern understandings of people in the past.

This helps explain why, in recent years, micro-level research has increasingly been paired with macro-level analysis. By situating individual experience within major events such as social transformation, historians have sought to compensate for narrative ruptures caused by the insufficiency of historical materials. This suggests that the narrative revived through new cultural history is only a conditional form of narrative—one that differs markedly from narrative understood as an intrinsic attribute of history itself. History—or the study of the past—aims to disclose and explain processes of change. Narrative, as something internal to history, should likewise recount and represent such continuous change. It may therefore be said that historical narrative, especially narrative marked by coherence and continuity, remains a worthy pursuit for historians, precisely because it enables a deeper and broader understanding of history.

Zhang Xupeng is a research fellow from the Institute of Historical Theory at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.