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Books > History > Theory & methods > Historiography
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Mythistory (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,737
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Mythistory (Hardcover)
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Ever since Herodotus declared in "Histories that to preserve the
memories of the great achievements of the Greeks and other nations
he would count on their own stories, historians have debated
whether and how they should deal with myth. Most have sided with
Thucydides, who denounced myth as "unscientific" and banished it
from historiography.
In "Mythistory, Joseph Mali revives this oldest controversy in
historiography. Contesting the conventional opposition between myth
and history, Mali advocates instead for a historiography that
reconciles the two and recognizes the crucial role that myth plays
in the construction of personal and communal identities. The task
of historiography, he argues, is to illuminate, not eliminate,
these fictions by showing how they have passed into and shaped
historical reality. Drawing on the works of modern theorists and
artists of myth such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Joyce and
Eliot, Mali redefines modern historiography and relates it to the
older notion and tradition of "mythistory."
Tracing the origins and transformations of this historiographical
tradition from the ancient world to the modern, Mali shows how Livy
and Machiavelli sought to recover true history from uncertain
myth-and how Vico and Michelet then reversed this pattern of
inquiry, seeking instead to recover a deeper and truer myth from
uncertain history. In the heart of "Mythistory, Mali turns his
attention to four thinkers who rediscovered myth in and for modern
cultural history: Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Ernst Kantorowicz,
and Walter Benjamin. His elaboration of the different biographical
and historiographical routes by which all four sought to account
for the persistenceand significance of myth in Western civilization
opens up new perspectives for an alternative intellectual history
of modernity-one that may better explain the proliferation of
mythic imageries of redemption in our secular, all too secular,
times.
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