Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877456240 ISBN 13: 9780877456247

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 1998

Synopsis

Social historians today are calling into question the persuasiveness of the master narratives that have dominated our stories about the past. Motivated now by personal and professional commitments to solving problems by telling stories, not by epistemological and ontological certitude, social historians are constructing alternative narratives relevant to an expanded, more inclusive audience. The essays in this thoughtful volume reflect an explicit self-consciousness about historians' choices of narrative strategies, a new skepticism of the rhetorical strategies embedded in all scholarly arguments, and a recognition that every historian has a point of view.

Critically examining past master narratives in light of emerging alternatives, these essayists ask us to reevaluate the stories we tell, the narrative traditions within which they are situated, and the audiences they are designed to persuade. The first essays explore the gendered character of social history rhetoric by exposing alternative, feminist traditions of social scientific and social historical writing. The second section focuses on alternative narrative traditions of historical writing in non-European contexts, specifically India, Japan, and China. And the third group spotlights the rhetorical uses of synthesis in the writings of social historians.

The essays feature the range of narrative possibilities available to historians who have become self-critical about the pervasive use of unexamined master narratives; they show how limited that tradition can be compared with the diverse alternatives derived from, for example, gendered traditions of Latin American travel writers of the nineteenth century, Victorian women's historical writing, or the lively subaltern tradition in Indian social history. Together they argue not for the abandonment of historical materialism or the elimination of all master narratives but for the reinvigoration of social history through the use of new and more persuasive arguments based on alternative narratives.

About this title

About the Author

Shelton Stromquist is a professor of history at the University of Iowa and the author of Reinventing "The People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism, and other books.
Jeffrey Cox is Professor of History at the University of Iowa. He is the author of" The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870-1930" and the co-editor of" Contesting the Master Narrative: Essays in Social History."

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877456240
• ISBN 13: 9780877456247
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296
• Editor: Cox Jeffrey N., Stromquist Shelton