A History of "History"

Jill Lepore is an historian, a professor of history at Harvard, and a novelist. In this week's New Yorker, she has written a piece examining four centuries of evolution in our thinking about the relative merits of "novels" and "histories." An insightful, informative brief on the surprisingly fluid ideas surrounding "fiction," "truth," "history," "fact," and other abstractions, the article adumbrates a lively relationship between the perhaps not-so-distinct disciplines at the heart of next January's Seminar, Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. Here's an excerpt:

Historians and novelists are kin, in other words, but they're more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other's clothes. The literary genre that became known as "the novel" was born in the eighteenth century. History, the empirical sort based on archival research and practiced in universities, anyway, was born at much the same time. Its novelty is not as often remembered, though, not least because it wasn't called "novel." In a way, history is the anti-novel, the novel's twin, though which is Cain and which is Abel depends on your point of view.

Link to the full New Yorker article.