Fiction of narrative essays on history, literature, and theory, 1957-2007

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Collingwood and Toynbee: transitions in English historical thought -- Religion, culture, and western civilization in Christopher Dawson's Idea of history -- The abiding relevance of Croce's Idea of history -- Romanticism, historicism, and realism: toward a period concept for early nineteenth-century intellectual history -- The tasks of intellectual history -- The culture of criticism: Gombrich, Auerbach, Popper -- The structure of historical narrative -- What is a historical system? -- The politics of contemporary philosophy of history -- The problem of change in literary history -- The problem of style in realistic representation: Marx and Flaubert -- The discourse of history -- Vico and structuralist/poststructuralist thought -- The interpretation of texts -- Historical pluralism and pantextualism -- The "nineteenth century" as chronotope -- Ideology and counterideology in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of criticism -- Writing in the middle voice -- Northrop Frye's place in contemporary cultural studies -- Storytelling: historical and ideological -- The suppression of rhetoric in the nineteenth century -- Postmodernism and textual anxieties -- Guilty of history? the longue durée of Paul Ricoeur.